Martial arts

In the next theater, the hit flick about a S&M couple with time on their hands:

Mr. Turner

Crit

I am really a lowbrow when it comes to the fine arts. Oh, yes, I've been to lots of great art museums, and I've experienced moments of transport at some of them. but mostly what I associate with art museums is sore feet from lots of standing. If I had to stand for 2 hours to watch a movie, I wouldn't be a big fan of this medium either.

So while many people have eagerly anticipated seeing how Mike Leigh incorporated famous paintings by J. M. W. Turner in the visual makeup of his film, I, too ignorant of Turner's work to recognize the specific allusions, eagerly anticipated the wonderful character actor Timothy Spall having the opportunity to carry a film on his broad and rough-hewn back.

I know next to nothing about the real Mr. Turner--whether rumbles and growls made up much of his verbal idiom; whether he was garrulous only with his father and his fellow artists, calculatedly cordial with potential patrons, and all but wordless with the adoring servant whom he used (roughly) as a sperm receptacle; whether he neglected and denied his daughters by a woman who apparently was his common-law wife for years, and whose surliness seems richly earned; whether he finally found loving contentment and something like a relationship of equals, with an elderly, twice-widowed innkeeper. But certainly in the future when I think of Turner, and when I see his work, it's the Turner of Leigh and Spall I'll think of. And that's one reason why I love the movies. Getting to sit down to watch them is another.

Trailers

• '71--English soldier left behind in Belfast during the Troubles.
• Relatos salvajes (Wild tales)--Argentinean anthology about extreme behavior, nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar®.
• The Walk--Breathtaking sweeping close-ups of those iconic vertical elements of a pair of towers that no longer exist get your attention immediately. Robert Zemeckis revisits, in 3D, the story told pretty much perfectly in the 2008 documentary Man on Wire.