What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Having seen Leo McKern in an excellent TV movie about Turner titled "The Sun is God", I was eagerly looking forward to this film. For me, it failed on virtually every account. I wanted to know why Turner got out of bed in the morning to chase the sun and the light. I wanted to know what drove him to paint such wonderful pictures, and what technique he used. I wanted to feel his inspiration. I was appalled by the directors offensive portrayal of John Ruskin, who was an amazing man, a great writer, an ecologist (who took on the polluting Mill owners and struck a blow for the environment) a wonderful watercolour artist in his own right and a champion of Turner. The one redeeming scene was of The Fighting Temeraire being towed away on the Thames. This is often voted one of Britains favourite pictures, and there it was on the cinema screen, brought to life. Sadly - the incredible artist Turner was not brought to life - but reduced to a grotesque soulless caricature.

MR. TURNER is Mike Leigh's biopic of the famous Victorian painter, with Timothy Spall in the title role. It's a lengthy and slightly disappointing movie, mainly because it's quite good but not excellent, as I'd heard. People make out this film to be some kind of masterpiece, and while it does feel authentic and interesting, it fails to grip like other biopics. It's overlong and meandering in places, and as a director Leigh is interested in minute detail rather than the bigger picture.Put it like this: I watched the James Mason film THE DESERT FOX the day before, and as a biopic of the Nazi commander Rommel that was head and shoulders above this film. It had heart, soul, and drama, and MR. TURNER struggles with all of those. What this film does have is plenty of authenticity, bringing the 19th century to colourful and vivid life, and a surprising amount of humour that works. Spall is fine in the title role, but you get the impression that this Turner is a caricature rather than a fully-fledged and fully-rounded fellow. He has no character development and remains simply a classic British eccentric. Compare this to something like CREATION, which really attempted to get into the nitty gritty of Darwin's life and what made him tick, and MR. TURNER suffers by comparison.

Another reviewer of this title claims that the problem with this film is that there is no plot. I don't agree. Do our lives have plots? Do the lives of famous people and artists have plots? Did Glen Miller really spend the majority of his life seeking a sound? I may be wrong but it seems to me that what Mike Leigh has done here is exactly what the complainer says he has, namely assembled a series of realistic scenes from Turner's life and let the audience decide what is the plot, if there is indeed one. My thoughts were immediately what is this film saying about the motivation of an uncouth man to create paintings constantly? Did he sense in the late 18th century and early 19th century that art wasn't just a case of seeking the approbation of his contemporaries? He clearly had an eye on his contemporaries, with the story of the red spot on his painting that referred to Constable's work hung next to his. His charity towards Hayden. He clearly enjoyed the camaraderie of his fellow academicians but what did he really think about their work? Then there was his attitude to women. His ex partner, who bore him two sons, his housekeeper who he used without any care, the attitude to the young prostitute and finally his obvious affection for Mrs Booth. All told as a film it was never going to be a modern thriller, but was it as cerebral as it would like to be? Yes I think it was. I'd be interested to see if others saw different narratives in this wonderfully shot and marvellously researched film?

In this film, Mike Leigh is telling us that, while doubtless "beautiful inside", not all artists are gorgeous physically, and not all of them have (or are surrounded by) either beauty or particularly high standards of behaviour. As the years pass, we their admirers have turned these people into saints or gods that they never were nor could have been. The Director tends to push (at times even flog?) this idea to its limits, and perhaps beyond them, given that real-life depictions of the young Turner suggest a moderately good-looking man (in the film we see the middle-aged version onwards - Turner's quite impressive dates were 1775-1851). In some sense, then, we are back with the portrayal of Mozart by Tom Hulce in "Amadeus". However, "Mr Turner" lacks the dramatic sub-plots of the latter film, and the man of the title is not given to buffoonery. In general, our hero is far more down-to-earth, even if his paintings may conceivably be greater (and more revolutionary) works than even Mozart's music. What this film does have is very interesting handling of the title role by Timothy Spall, plus numerous snippets of real history. Hence JMW Turner here is a more-nuanced character, being a bit crude and lusty, for example, but also very hardworking, basically kind and charitable, knowledgeable of the world, and extremely fond of his supportive father (a former barber skilled at his trade and able to make some money, as is his son, but trapped irrevocably in the lower classes). Turner the son, on the other hand, bridges some of the class divisions through his "push", worldly-wisdom and of course sheer brilliance, as well as his relative wealth and his fundamentally amenable - if gruff/brusque - nature. How much of this positive side to the film is the real history and how much Spall's portrayal is a little (nicely) hard to determine, but it seems the "facts" of history are stuck to fairly closely, and (what one imagines is) a SUPERB job is done of portraying the increasingly-assertive, full-of-achievement/talent, but also rough-and-ready Britain of those times, warts and all. One can enjoy (and even be moved by) scenes during which Turner comes into contact with other figures from his day who have gone on to become (as) legendary for their influence on British and world art, and indeed history in general (John Ruskin, 1819-1900, might be a classic example, and of course there is also a brief encounter with John Constable, 1776-1837). There are moments in the film when Turner's greatest paintings (notably "The Fighting Temeraire" (1838) and "Rain, Steam and Speed" (1844)) are anticipated directly, but there are also a number of shots in the film (notably of people at doorways looking out to the sea) in which Mike Leigh seems to have turned the film stock into canvas, and there is still enormous beauty in the midst of all that dirt and disease and lack of hygiene. All credit to him for that, and for giving us such an accurate and fascinating - if not always appealing - insight into the Britain of the years 1820-1851.