Name : Farran Smith Nehme / Alias : New York Post
Director Andrey Zvyagintsev's film combines allegory, brutal melodrama, black humor and strikingly beautiful compositions, each frame dense with meaning.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
Many conversations start and end around a kitchen table. Why, then, should we be left with such an impression of grandeur, limitless suffering, and wrath?

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Bleak and relentless as well as impeccably made, biblical in its name as well as its moral outrage at the powerlessness of the individual in the face of unchecked authority, "Leviathan" is dealing with nothing less than the current state of Russia's soul.

Name : Mike D'Angelo / Alias : AV Club
Leviathan is another downer, but it's considerably looser and livelier than its predecessors, verging at times on black comedy.

Name : Joe McGovern / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
What emerges is a Putin-offending critique of how the power-abusing state and the power-worshipping church collude to create millions of Jobs.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
This is a whale of a movie, grotesque and a little bloated but impossible to ignore.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
The movie expands, breathtakingly, into mordant humor, impenetrable mystery, ferocious satire and classic tragedy.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
Nothing will surprise Zvyagintsev fans more than discovering how funny the film is, as the helmer and co-writer Oleg Negin extend the darkly satirical streak they began with Elena.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
The heart and soul of Leviathan is Serebriakov's Kolia, who carries deep sorrow in his eyes and on his shoulders, even as he fends off defeat for longer than you'd imagine possible.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Director Andrey Zvyagintsev puts contemporary Russia, as up-to-the-minute as Putin and Pussy Riot, under the microscope. Leviathan is a stupendous piece of work that transcends language and borders.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Filled with a desolate beauty.

Name : Leslie Felperin / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Andrei Zvyagintsev's fourth feature is a thriller, a black social comedy, and a thinly veiled swipe at Putin's regime in one tidy package.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
'Leviathan' is structured as an intimate suspense story, with a Job-like hero on whom all sorts of hell will be visited by an uncaring state.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
This is really a movie about a feeling, or really, about a lack of feeling - about what happens to people in a dominant culture of bullying and abuse, when they have no escape except what's inside the next bottle, no options except not waking up.

Name : Graham Fuller / Alias : New York Daily News
A bleak, beautiful, and bitterly funny parable of post-Soviet Russia.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Despite flashes of absurdist comedy from some secondary characters, the movie closes around you like the fist it protests and laments.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
For all his failings, Kolya, in the movie's terms, is a natural man, and so his fate in fighting his implacable enemies in the state has a mythic resonance. The movie would not be as powerful as it is if he were haloed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 .