Ceylans

Nuri Bilge Ceylan makes long films, by movie standards, but short ones by Russian literature standards. HT Image There may be no filmmaker more consciously working in a novelistic tradition. The Turkish director counts reading “Crime and Punishment” as a formative experience. His Palme d'Or-winning 2014 film “Winter Sleep” adapted a pair of Chekhov short stories. But regardless of any direct correlations, Ceylan's films — colossal, existential, talky — reach for (and often attain) an enveloping vastness that…

Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan has delivered another of his expansive, ruminative and distinctly Chekhovian character-driven dramas. Again it is spread out across the landscape of western Anatolia, and again there is Ceylan’s emphasis on still photography and portraiture. This film does however have one very atypical touch: a very startling and Brechtian meta-moment when we are reminded this is a film we’re watching, and the tiny and flickeringly firelit interiors are created on a soundstage.It certainly does however…