Mr. Turner

Mr. Turner (2014) is Mike Leigh's biographical drama you can watch online on iFILM. Timothy Spall plays painter J.M.W. Turner as a hulking, grunting figure who spits on his own canvases to get the light right.

The film follows Turner through the last quarter-century of his life. He roams the English coast, has himself lashed to a ship's mast in a storm to feel the weather, and pushes landscape painting toward something almost abstract. At home his devoted housekeeper aches for him and gets nothing back. In a seaside town he quietly takes up with a widowed landlady, Mrs. Booth, while his aging barber father grinds the pigments and London's art world swings between worship and ridicule for his late work.

Leigh built the picture through months of improvised rehearsal rather than a locked script, and Dick Pope's cinematography turns each frame into something close to a Turner canvas — work that, with Spall's lead performance, took prizes at Cannes in 2014. It is slow, tactile and refreshingly free of biopic shorthand: two and a half hours spent living beside a difficult genius. Stream Mr. Turner (2014) online on iFILM.