Name : Frank Scheck / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
It's not so much the plot or themes of the film that's the problem as the ham-fisted execution.

Name : Vadim Rizov / Alias : AV Club
Much of what follows is turgid and, for non-believers, ridiculous.

Name : Michael Rechtshaffen / Alias : Los Angeles Times
[A] Bible study class of a feature film .

Name : Joe Leydon / Alias : Variety
By far the most slickly produced and insistently evangelical movie yet from the sibling team of Alex and Stephen Kendrick.

Name : Tom Russo / Alias : Boston Globe
The first couple of acts of the Kendricks' latest, "War Room," are so heavy on broad pulpit pounding that it's challenging to get swept along by the story's message.

Name : Tom Keogh / Alias : Seattle Times
A Christian faith-based drama with fire, good performances and a nice luster to its look and feel, "War Room" is an engaging film that derails itself only when the story occasionally stops for protracted preaching.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Mr. Turner" is a rich portrait of England at a particularly scabrous period.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The sprawling, loosely structured 2 1/2 hour drama has some of the year's most stunning visuals, many of which appear as artfully composed scenes in Turner's work.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Failure isn't only the province of the lazy and uninspired. No, even the gifted and conscientious must occasionally take a stroll through that blasted landscape, and with Mr. Turner Leigh does it, for 2 1/2 hours. Don't go with him.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Epic in breadth and length (2 1/2 hours), and gorgeously photographed (digitally) by Bill Pope, Mr. Turner is intimate in incident.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
It's not a pretty portrait of the artist. But it is a real one.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
"Mr. Turner" is a mighty work of critical imagination, a loving, unsentimental portrait of a rare creative soul.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Writing about Mr. Turner a few weeks after seeing it, I feel a craving to be again immersed in its world, which is rich with colors, textures, and, it sometimes almost seems, smells .

Name : Bill Zwecker / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
I can't say enough about the power of Spall's performance.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
"Mr. Turner" is a harsh, strange, but stirring movie, no more a conventional artist's bio-pic than Robert Altman's wonderful, little-seen film about van Gogh and his brother, "Vincent and Theo."

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
Spall may make a grotesque of Turner - piggish, rutting, whoring - but he finds such incandescence in the world around him. And director Mike Leigh lets you see that incandescence as Turner saw it: Everywhere.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
It's a painfully uneven movie, but its best moments are ravishingly good.

Name : Katie Kilkenny / Alias : The Atlantic
A gorgeous, important film.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Any expectations of reverential biography are quickly dispelled by Mr. Leigh's sharp, scintillating script and Mr. Spall's uncanny daring.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
Despite his own failings and faults, Leigh and Spall's Turner is a man consumed by the search for truth and beauty, even in the midst of the less than pretty truths of his times.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Leigh shows us the world as Turner sees it-harsh and ravishing. His beauty of a movie touches the heart not by sentimental gush but by the amplitude of its art.​

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Mike Leigh takes on the topsy-turvy life of J.M.W. Turner in an exquisitely detailed, brilliantly acted biopic.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Timothy Spall - best known to mainstream audiences as Wormtail in the Harry Potter series - delivers an Oscar-caliber tour de force reminiscent of Charles Laughton

Name : Keith Staskiewicz / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
To use a word often associated with Turner and his art, it's sublime.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
Timothy Spall - a veteran of Mike Leigh's films - plays this eccentric, determined London bohemian like a bronchial, cantankerous, randy old toad with backache.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Keen observer Mike Leigh brings his hawk's eye to a vibrant rendering of J.M.W. Turner, the celebrated British "painter of light."

Name : Sasha Stone / Alias : TheWrap
As is usual with any Mike Leigh film - a style unique and trademarked by now - his ensemble is a collection of remarkably adept actors who know their characters so well they could stay in character for weeks, continually improvising, as they often do.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
With his incomparable Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh continues to make other directors look simpleminded.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
Leigh and lead Timothy Spall make full use of their canvas, creating a sprawling portrayal of a wonderfully messy personality.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
This is less your standard-issue biopic than a foray into the mystery of human feeling.

Name : Leslie Felperin / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Mr. Turner manages to illuminate that nexus between biography and art with elegant understatement.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
J.M.W. Turner, arguably the greatest of British painters, was an uncommonly difficult man, and "Mr. Turner," the exceptional film Mike Leigh has made about him, does not do things the easy way either.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
"Mr. Turner" is a rich, ruthless and profoundly compassionate study of life and love and art, for those who find themselves on its wavelength, but it also presents itself as a challenge.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Without a speck of pomposity Leigh's film - one of the year's best - honors its subject in all his tetchy ambiguity.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
The gap between the celestial art of the great English romantic painter Joseph Mallord William Turner and the brutish details of his life is vividly explored in Mike Leigh's tragicomic movie Mr. Turner.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
A portrait of the artist as visionary oddball, for whom life was an endless source of both beauty and the irritating distractions blocking his view of said beauty.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Timothy Spall gives an admirably warty and unpleasant performance as Turner, an arrogant and uncompromising man who's annoyed by his celebrity in Britain but shocked when the public turns against his work.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
A vacuous endurance test about an abstract loser.