Mr. Turner (2014)
Directed by Mike Leigh
Eccentric British painter J.M.W. Turner lives his last 25 years with gusto and secretly becomes involved with a seaside landlady, while his faithful housekeeper bears an unrequited love for him.
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What critics compared Mr. Turner to
There’s a borderline sadism here reminiscent of Leigh’s purgative Naked.
The writer-director is best known for the acerbic dramas — Naked , Secrets & Lies, Vera Drake — that he prepares in months-long workshops with his cast.
Leigh, the writer and director of such classics as " Naked " and " Secrets and Lies ," usually tells stories set in the present day, often of a more urban character.
Written and directed by British master Mike Leigh ( Naked , Another Year ), the film is a portrait of the artist as visionary oddball, for whom life was an endless source of both beauty and the irritating distractions blocking his view of said beauty.
Leigh, himself a somewhat curmudgeonly romantic, is best known for his caustic portraits of contemporary British life (Naked, Secrets and Lies).
With such films as "Secrets & Lies," "Vera Drake," "Another Year" and "Naked" to his credit, Leigh's history as a master of astute character psychology speaks for itself.
But Leigh doesn’t present this seeming disjunction between the artist and his art as ironic, the way Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus bludgeoned you with the contrast between Mozart’s coarse manner and supernal music.
Whether it’s Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon or Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, there are movies in which the fundamental act of living a life starts to accrue a profound, hypnotic power.
Ace cinematographer Dick Pope ( Mr. Turner , The Illusionist ) lights it like a spooky Mayfair nightclub with pools of warm glow amid the cluttered dark.