The Mumpsimus

Mike Leigh's latest movie, Peterloo , is one of the most disappointing films I've ever seen. This is not to say it is necessarily a bad movie — there are countless worse ones, and, indeed, there are things to admire in Peterloo . Disappointment depends on one's expectations; mine were so high that I sought out a British DVD because Peterloo  isn't being released in U.S. theatres until next month, and maybe not to a theatre anywhere near my rural world. (Amazon is one of the producers, so I assume it will hit Amazon Prime once it finishes its limited U.S. run.) My disappointment stemmed from having not been disappointed with a Mike Leigh film since 1997's Career Girls , a movie about which the less said, the better. With that one exception, Leigh's run from High Hopes  in 1988 to Mr. Turner  in 2014 seems to me one of the most consistently interesting of any English-language filmmaker. (His earlier work I have more mixed feelings about. A lot of it se...

Two new biographical films give viewers an opportunity to see diametrically opposite approaches not just to biography, but to film narrative itself. A warning: I saw Mr. Turner and The Imitation Game months ago (as part of the annual Telluride at Dartmouth festival), and my thoughts here are based purely on memories that are getting ever dimmer. Nonetheless, the differences between the films are so striking that I couldn't help but keep thinking about them, to keep reading about the stories' subjects, and to keep coming back to the idea of how information is conveyed through moving pictures. I went into both films with relatively high expectations, since I adore Mike Leigh 's work and I had very much enjoyed Headhunters , the previous movie directed by Imitation Game's Morten Tyldum . And overall I did like both Mr. Turner and The Imitation Game ; however, "like" is part of a broad spectrum, and for me, Mr. Turner was a powerful emotional and a...