The film, consistent with The Wild Pear Tree, is essentially a story about being stuck.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film takes a leisurely approach to narrative that’s both intensely dialogical and transfixingly visual.
The Wild Pear Tree sees Nuri Bilge Ceylan in a kind of self-aware dialogue with himself about the methodologies of his work.
Ceylan’s gift is to make interesting stories out of locating small eddies of change in the midst of eternally fixed dynamics.
With his latest, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s characteristic obsession with his country’s variegated topography takes him to Cappadocia.
The film is one of the major masterpieces of the young decade thus far.
Aleksandr Mindadze’s Innocent Saturday ultimately adds up to a lot of nasty hysteria.
Even when the strain to invest genre material with epic-scale profundity sometimes shows, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia still manages to weave a hypnotic spell, longueurs and all.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film is a static, faux moral reckoning dictated from on high.
Note to self: Be careful what you wish for.
With his latest, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is purely interested in slowly unveiling a thematic can of worms that will tear people apart one long take at a time.
If Cannes is the cinephile’s version of the Olympics, the media critics covering the event are its long-distance runners.
The cardinal sin of reviewing a film must be criticizing it for omissions it never cared about including in the first place.
But it’s hard to reconcile this Ceylan with the deadpan stylist who drew my attention with 2002’s Distant.
Looking for an adultery- and revenge-fueled family melodrama so subdued that it keeps a hit-and-run fatality, cuckoldry, and murder entirely off screen?
What a long, strange week it’s been.
After the disappointment of Blindness on day one, I enter day two ready to make the most of my time here in Cannes.
Climates suggests Neil LaBute directing an apolitical rendering of Hiroshima, Mon Amour.
Fans of Ceylan’s film will appreciate the worthwhile features New Yorker Video has included on this DVD edition.
The entire film is stitched together from a collection of long shots that stress the expansive emotional distance between an odd couple.