Variety by Scott Foundas

Leigh has made another highly personal study of art, commerce and the glacial progress of establishment tastes, built around a lead performance from longtime Leigh collaborator Timothy Spall that’s as majestic as one of Turner’s own swirling sunsets.

Time Out London by Dave Calhoun

As ever with Leigh, Mr Turner addresses the big questions with small moments. It's an extraordinary film, all at once strange, entertaining, thoughtful and exciting.

The Telegraph by Robbie Collin

Beyond the troughful of fun tics, Spall makes Turner tenderly and totally human — the effect of which is to make his artistic talents seem even more extraordinary still.

The Hollywood Reporter by Leslie Felperin

Anchored by a masterful performance by Timothy Spall in a role he was born to play, and gilded by career-best effort from DoP Dick Pope, working for the first time on digital for Leigh to bridge the gap between the painting and cinematography, Mr. Turner manages to illuminate that nexus between biography and art with elegant understatement.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

What a glorious film this is, richly and immediately enjoyable, hitting its satisfying stride straight away. It's funny and visually immaculate; it combines domestic intimacy with an epic sweep and has a lyrical, mysterious quality that perfumes every scene, whether tragic or comic.

Empire by Ian Nathan

Shimmering with awards potential, Leigh’s glorious picture is a hilarious, confounding, wholehearted and dazzlingly performed portrait of an artist as an ageing man.

Total Film by Neil Smith

One great British artist pays tribute to another in a lengthy but rewarding homage that boasts a titanic turn at its centre. Rarely has watching paint dry been so fascinating.

Village Voice by Stephanie Zacharek

Leigh, Spall, and cinematographer Dick Pope — who borrows lots of lighting tricks from Vermeer and Ingres and even Turner himself, to glorious effect — have gently atomized Turner's character, breaking it into small, potent fragments that affect us in ways we don't see coming.

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

Mr. Turner is a mighty work of critical imagination, a loving, unsentimental portrait of a rare creative soul. But even as it celebrates a glorious painter and illuminates the sources of his pictures with startling clarity and insight, the movie patiently and thoroughly demolishes more than a century’s worth of mythology about what art is and how artists work.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

Just as Turner's expressive, enthralling work changed the nature of painting, Mr. Turner, anchored in the rock of Timothy Spall's astonishing, Cannes prize-winning performance, pushes hard against the strictures of conventional narrative and ends up pulling us into its world and capturing us completely.

The Playlist by Oliver Lyttelton

Mr Turner, though not without flaws, is something of a twilight culmination of Leigh's work, and very much one in which the filmmaker turns his lens on himself, as is so often the case when directors make movies about artists.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

Mr. Turner is a first-rate match of director and subject. Less an explication of the man's genius than an immersion into its essence.

Slant Magazine by Chris Cabin

An astute summation of Mike Leigh's glum view of humanity, but also a challenge to this disposition and his own pessimistic perspective.

CineVue by John Bleasdale

In arguably a career-topping performance, Timothy Spall plays the cantankerous painter as a complex, grunting, snarling and utterly single-minded creature.

Hitfix

Mr. Turner's passions and neuroses feel more peculiar to Leigh and his own work. It's tempting, even, to view the film as biopic-as-self-portrait, revealing shades of one life through another.