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Filmmaker Mike Leigh s biography of the landscape painter J.M.W. Turner is what critics call austere which means it s slow and grim and deliberately hard to love yet it s fascinating, and the performances and photography are outstanding. 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. His notable exceptions, such as the outstanding Topsy-Turvy and this movie, require him to work in a somewhat different vein, and be more attentive to composition and atmosphere and period-accurate psychology; but it s just as compelling a mode, because Leigh s emotionally reserved nature comes through more strongly, and seems attuned to his buttoned-up, often repressed characters, who shove negative thoughts way down inside themselves, practically to the bottoms of their feet, and soldier on.