Talk about suffering for your art. Achieving his acclaimed performance as the masterful British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner in “Mr. Turner” took so much out of Timothy Spall, the veteran actor found himself kneeling down at the artist’s tomb in St. Paul’s Cathedral when it was all over—and crying.

The top 10 films of 2014, according to AP writers Jake Coyle and Jocelyn Noveck.

How do you joke about the Sony hacking story? After all, it was an attempt at comedy that launched this whole sobering mess.

Once she’d decided to take on her gritty new role in “Wild,” there were a few things Reese Witherspoon knew she DIDN’T want to hear from movie studio executives.

You can take the man away from the humor. But you clearly can’t always take the humor from the man.

The most frightening thing about Jake Gyllenhaal in “Nightcrawler”—even more than those sallow, sunken cheeks, those googly eyes, and that unkempt hair tied into a greasy bun—is his smile.

If we were going to be curmudgeonly about it—and “St. Vincent” is, after all, a movie about a curmudgeon—we’d focus on the one major flaw in the film, and not on its pleasures.

When we first see Michael Keaton in “Birdman,” Alejandro G. Inarritu’s bracingly inventive and accomplished new film about fame, relevance, self-worth, and lots of other intense stuff, he’s sitting in his white undies, in the middle of a dressing room.

The movie poster for “The Good Lie” features a smiling Reese Witherspoon, front and center. But, truth be told, neither Witherspoon nor her character is the film’s star—not in the essential sense. The real stars are the Sudanese children at the bottom of the poster, their backs to us, trudging across an empty, sun-scorched expanse.

If you were lucky enough to catch Denzel Washington in “A Raisin in the Sun” on Broadway, you saw the hugely charismatic actor portray, in an iconic role, the full complexity of a human being: strengths and weaknesses, attributes and flaws, durability and vulnerability. All topped off, of course, with that boyish Washington charm.