MR. TURNER Special Screenings

In his latest sumptuous work, director Mike Leigh creates a portrait of iconoclastic painter J.M.W. Turner, mid-19th century master of light and color. This meditation examines the nature of art itself, in conflict with the changing perceptions of peers and a fickle public, as well as the personal sacrifices that Turner made on behalf of creation. Leigh follows his subject from middle-age – when he is already at the height of his career – through to the end of his life, evoking the artist’s own style with painstaking period detail and luminescent cinematography (by Leigh’s longtime cinematographer Dick Pope). At the center of this captivating story is Timothy Spall, who won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his portrayal of the title character, a guttural brute of a man with often repulsive tendencies but from whose hands flowed masterworks.