Mr. Turner

Mike Leigh developed Mr. Turner the way he develops everything — months of improvisation with the cast before a script existed — and took it into the Cannes competition in 2014, where Timothy Spall won Best Actor and Dick Pope won the technical prize for the cinematography. It went on to four Academy Award nominations.

The film covers Turner's last twenty-five years. Spall grunts, spits at canvases, visits brothels, has himself lashed to a mast in a storm, treats his housekeeper Hannah Danby with a casual cruelty the film refuses to excuse, and takes rooms in Margate with a widowed landlady under the name Mr Booth. Around him: the Royal Academy varnishing days, where he sabotages a rival's picture with a blob of red; Ruskin, played as an insufferable young aesthete; his father grinding pigment in the basement. Pope's images quote Turner's palette without ever tipping into pastiche, and Gary Yershon's score is deliberately unlovely.

Leigh's argument is that the sublime came out of a man who was physically unimpressive, socially awkward and often unkind, and that these facts do not cancel each other. Critics called it his best film in a decade and the most convincing portrait of a working painter the cinema has produced — largely because it spends so much time on the labour: the boat hired, the light waited for, the pigment ground.