Painterly portrait of a modern master

THERE are myriad pleasures to be had from watching Mr Turner, a biopic about the last 25 years of the 19th-century British painter JMW Turner, not least of which is an acute sense of being right there by the artist's side as he takes in a scene that will later be turned into one of his famous landscapes. With a command performance by Timothy Spall as the monumentally gifted but deeply flawed title character, Mr Turner is - just one week into the New Year - one of the best films of 2015.

Written and directed by Mike Leigh, a filmmaker with a rare ability to capture the nuances - both the mundane and the sublime - of daily life - Mr Turner is one of those films where nothing much happens but where the joy is to be found in the…