I must admit to feeling, briefly, just a little disappointed on first sight of Maggi Hambling’s Walls of Water, nine new paintings on show at the National Gallery. Perhaps it was the evocative title, which promises high drama and instant gratification, something obviously and extravagantly impressive. In short, I was expecting something bigger, an absurd statement because eight out of the nine canvases measure more than six by seven feet. And yet, they are small.

David Hockney was continually rejuvenated by his transatlantic commuting. The painter, printmaker, draughtsman, photographer, and stage designer, was also a writer producing theories of seeing, and was fascinated by digital technology. Randall Wright's narration is set out in a series of short chapters in a montage-cum-collage of photographs, earlier films both amateur and professional, home video and recent interviews with the inhabitants of Hockney’s world today and in the past.

Anselm Kiefer reminds me a bit of someone I once worked for. Totally unpredictable, and possessed of a formidable intelligence and creativity, his mental leaps can be bewilderingly hard to follow, leading occasionally to truly breathtaking results, but crashing and burning just as often. Everyone else, like me, or in Kiefer’s case his long-suffering assistant Tony, not to mention poor old Alan Yentob, has to trot along behind, barely able to keep up with the barrage of ideas, questions and orders, let alone judge whether any of it is any good.

There's been much talk about Late Turner, to co-opt the name of the exhibition now on view at Tate Britain covering the last 16 years in the English artist JMW Turner's singular career. And as if perfectly timed to chime with those canvases in celluloid terms is Mr Turner, the ravishing film that stands as a testimonial to what one might call Late Leigh. The writer-director Mike Leigh has made period pieces before, most notably Topsy-Turvy in 1999, but even by his own exalted standards this cinematic profile of one artist by another stands a league apart.

And just as Topsy-Turvy was as much a depiction of the man behind the camera as it was about Gilbert and Sullivan, so too does a palpable affinity for Leigh's current subject course through every frame of this Cannes prize-winning film. Leigh has never made any excuses either for himself or his pioneering approach to work, and so it is here with his take on a maverick painter whose aesthetic brilliance co-existed with a social brutishness that is neither condemned nor sanitised during the course of an utterly enveloping two and a half hours; it just is.To that extent, one may be struck by the noises that accompany Timothy Spall's performance as the Covent Garden barber's son (Paul Jesson is a winning presence as Turner père) who went on to shape the way we think about art: Spall spends much of the time grunting and snorting his way through the day, allowing his gathering proto-impressionism to speak more volubly than he himself chooses to do. But one is never in doubt about the visionary grace that seems to take Turner over once a sketchbook or paintbrush come into play. For all Leigh's long-proven mastery of language, Mr Turner reminds us time and again that there are other ways of connecting to the world. Or not, as the case may be.

Indeed, this is hardly the first portrait of an artist as a dysfunctional family man - a jettisoned mistress (Ruth Sheen, another Leigh veteran) pitches up with her brood in tow. Alas, Turner's affections by that point have long since been given over first to an abject-seeming housekeeper (a rivetingly indrawn Dorothy Atkinson, pictured below with Spall) and ultimately to the widowed landlady, Sophia, who takes Turner in, this kind-hearted woman responding first to the man and only secondarily to the celebrated artist with whom she discovers she is sharing a house and then a bed. An open-faced Marion Bailey (Leigh's real-life partner) is a quiet sensation in this part, and one hopes amid all the deserved clamour afforded Spall, Leigh and inimitable cameraman Dick Pope that Bailey gets her due when prizes are doled out. 

The film places Turner in the social whirl of the age - his presence among the Royal Academy's politicking artistic fraternity is vividly caught - and in bustling, beady-eyed contemplation of nature, scene after scene subordinating the artist in pictorial terms to the vistas in front of him, or else capturing in filmic terms something of the heady investigation into the qualities of light that illuminate Turner's renown to this day. The film avoids the glib shorthand that often attends such ventures, and such connections as are made between his daily routine and his output go commendably unforced. There's a lovely sequence in which Turner absorbs a reminiscence from Sophia's then-living husband, Mr Booth (Karl Johnson), about his time aboard slave ships - from which encounter Turner's maritime classic T" (1840) was born. 

But exhilaratingly crisp though the film's look is, it never stoops to the merely pictorial, as if that choice would draw attention away from the inner drive and vigour that propel Turner ever onwards. Spall maps out each new chapter in the painter's art and life like some unsung pugilist forever trying to wrestle what he sees around him into an image that can be contained. And the fact that the painter is rarely if ever heard explaining either himself or his techniques seems in every way right. He's found a corresponding visionary in Leigh for whom empathy is the most majestic explanation there is.

View the trailer for Mr Turner overleaf

Written in the 16^th century, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists continues to underpin our understanding of the Renaissance, and its author is blamed, often with some justification, for a multitude of art historical anomalies. But there can be little doubt that Vasari’s omission of Giovanni Battista Moroni, a fine painter of portraits and religious subjects, has been instrumental in the disappearance of this artist from the Renaissance halls of fame.

There is early Turner; there is late Turner. Early Turner is very much of his time: a history and landscape painter in the first half of the 19^th century, looking back to the classicism of Claude and the Dutch Golden Age tradition of sombre marine painting; late Turner is outside time, or at least outside his own time. In his final decade, Turner paints his way to the future, gravitating towards formlessness and abstraction.

The doctoring of political images became something of a tradition in the last century, with Stalin, Hitler and Mao all airbrushing their enemies from photographs. The latest infrared technology has revealed that something similar may have happened during the English Civil War, with a portrait of Oliver Cromwell apparently having been painted over with an image of the Parliamentarian Sir Arthur Hesilrige, who fell out with Cromwell when he became Lord Protector in 1653. 

Perhaps the most surprising - and certainly the most moving moment - of the 2014 British Academy Film Awards was the awarding of Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema to Peter Greenaway. Surprising, not because this wasn't colossally deserved (and in keeping with tradition it was of course announced ahead of the event), but because our most idiosyncratic and subversive auteur has fallen out of fashion in recent years: a 2011 Time Out poll listing the "100 Best British Films" as chosen by industry experts, sadly saw not a single one of his works placed.

The National Gallery has a range of personas it adopts for its exhibitions, and for this one, about colour, it has deployed the po-faced, teachy one. The pompous tone is because it’s not just about art this time, there’s science in it, which makes it extra serious. And we know it’s science, because the posters and promotional material look like the cover of a chemistry textbook, with bursts of colour against a black background reminiscent of an explosion in a laboratory, or something exciting in space.

At the core of Memphis Living by Hernan Bas are five large paintings of equal size that could be blown-up spreads from a fashion magazine. Each features a modellish young man surrounded by statement architecture, iconic design and lush vegetation. But in the way their backgrounds tend toward abstraction, Bas confuses the viewer and confounds the lifestyle imagery.