The Missing Pictures of 2014, Part II: Feat. Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Latest Marvel
The Manifesto is ranking every movie from 2014. Before getting to our top 10, we’re supplementing our rankings with the handful of films we saw over the past month. This is the second installment of The Missing Pictures; the third will arrive tomorrow. And if you missed the first, you can find it here.
49. Mr. Turner (directed by Mike Leigh, 97% Rotten Tomatoes, 94 Metacritic). At one point in Mr. Turner, the film’s title character, played with glowering disdain by Timothy Spall, inquires about the mechanics of an invention called a camera. It’s a question that befits Turner’s intellectual curiosity, but it also carries a touch of irony, given that the movie’s director has been wielding a camera for the past several decades. Mr. Turner is not Leigh’s best film, but it may be his most exquisitely pictorial, and its painterly images (courtesy of Oscar-nominated cinematographer Dick Pope) might even satisfy the lofty standards of its protagonist.