Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Lise ★★★★½ 25

  There is a scene in this film, a background scene, that completely encapsulates the film for me.

  It is a scene of two shopkeepers judiciously sweeping the bits of sidewalk and road immediately in front of their place of business. In between the two sweepers lies a huge mound of sand.

  No matter how many times they sweep, within minutes any trace of their work will have disappeared.
  It will have made no difference.
  They keep sweeping.

  Nuri Bilge Ceylan takes a microscopic look at the mundane in the form of a crime. A murder has been committed. A man is dead. All those involved in the business of crime, from the criminal to the prosecutor to the police to…

• 

  Review by Ole Holgersen ★★★★★ 13

  This is my first meeting with a Nuri Bilge Ceylan film, and I was not disappointed. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a long, tiresome and difficult watch, and perhaps not for the restless, but it is a masterpiece, and the best of it's kind.

  Through the night, three cars carry a small group of men around in the rural surroundings of the Anatolian town Keskin, in search of a buried body. The group involves police officers, a doctor, a prosecutor, two grave diggers, army forces, and two brothers, both homicide suspects. The darkness and the seemingly visual indistinctness of the barren landscape do not help, each spot looks the same.

  It's an uncompromising film, seemingly possessed by some…

• 

  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★★ 14

  Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 19:14

  The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? Jeremiah 17:9

  These two Bible quotations, in my humble opinion, encapsulate the entire statement of Ceylan's new thought-provoking and mysterious crime story, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Leaving the crime plot elements aside, which are just the engine of the story, the answers are left intentionally unclear, but the messages are not.

  First, appearances are deceiving, and the heart is an intrinsically evil mystery, even to ourselves. Our scope of things is incredibly limited, and in our attempts to rationalize events around us, past…

• 

  Review by Es ★★★★★ 2

  Bir cinayet açığa kavuşturulurken fark ediyoruz ki bir çok kişi sevdiğini, benzetmek gerekirse ölüme terk ediyor. Doktor, çocuk yapmak istemeyecek kadar uzak aile hayatına ; savcı, aldattığı eşinin intihar ettiğinin cezasıyla ; komiser, pek de gitmek istemediği evinde ihmal ettiği eşinin ve hasta çocuğunun vicdan hesabında. Bir de başka bir adamı seven evli bir kadın var ki, arkadaşını öldüren adamla ortak işledikleri bir suç, bu cinayet.
  Savrulup giden hayatlar, bir bagajda ceset ile birlikte taşınan kavunlar, saflığı hatırlatan ama uzak bir köyde kimsenin haberi olmadığı güzel bir kadın, babasının ölümü henüzken; oyundan kaçan topa hevesle bir vuruş gibi olan çocukluk çağı, eşyaları bir poşete tıkılan-ki muhtemeldir çöpe atılacak - "bu sizin kocanız mıydı?" sorusuna eşinin donuk gözlerle cevap vermediği o kısa anda aslında çoktan ölmüş bir adam, derdi kola kadar olan bir genç, akan suda yuvarlanan elmalar, rüzgarda savrulan uzun otlar....
  Çok etkilendim filmden.

• 

  Review by aleyna ★★★★★ 7

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Film boyunca ortada sadece bir cinayet varmış gibi bir algıya kapılıyorsunuz fakat aslında bir değil çok cinayet var; şöyle ki:
  Maktul’un eşi, eşinin ölmesine sebep olmuştur… Bunu, onu en yakın arkadaşıyla aldatarak yapmıştır.
  Savcı da eşini; yani bashettiği o güzel kadını aldatarak, onun ölümüne sebep olmuştur.
  Zanlı rolündeki Kenan, en yakın arkadaşını, söz konusu aldatma meselesi yüzünden öldürmüştür.
  Ölümler sadece fiziksel yok oluşla da gerçekleşmiyor; başka türlü ölümler de vardır filmde görülen:
  Ortada, babasının Kenan olduğu iddia edilen bir çocuk vardır mesela. O da ölmüştür... Belki de şu halde en kötü ölüm onun payına düşmüştür..
  İnsan duyarsızlaşır bazen… Hiçbir şeyi göremez... Hissedemez... Taş kesilir adeta... Hatta taştan bile katı olur...
  Bu durumda da ölmüştür aslında insan. Yaşayan bir ölüdür artık…

• 

  Review by Steve Moyle ★★★★★ 7

  Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a masterful exploration of the human condition and is a film that I'm finding difficult to describe although I do feel like I understood a lot of what it's essentially saying about the sin and guilt of it's characters. The amount of depth to be found here makes for a hard review after just one viewing at least for me, the film is just so engrossing and meditative though. It's surely long but managed to just hold me in it's grip as I admired the masterful cinematography and complexities of the very natural performances. The dialogue is beautifully poetic and I'm not sure what else to say at this point other then that this is truly cinema in it's purest form, endlessly fascinating and hypnotically effective.

• 

  Review by Larry ★★★★★ 8

  sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything.

  death taketh what life giveth. the human experience will eventually be fragments of a life unfulfilled. it is but a bitter truth. a truth that we will deny as long as our hearts beat. a truth we'll disprove at all costs. our consciousness, caged in a fragile mortal shell, is the fog and meaning is the light that cuts through its thickness. life isn't meaningless. we create it's meaning. we breathe it's purpose. we ignite it's drive to search for itself. call it suffering or survival, it's all the same. we want to find meaning to this suffering, don't we?

  When you have a family, you'll have a story to tell, Doctor.…

• 

  Review by taylan ★★★★½

  "çoluk çocuk sahibi olunca anlatacak bir hikayen olur işte. fena mı? bir zamanlar anadolu'da dersin, ücra bir yerde görev yaparken işte başımdan böyle böyle olaylar geçti dersin. anlatırsın yani masal gibi..."

• 

  Review by ogün ★★★★★

  Türkiye'nin otopsisi

• 

  Review by Jonathan White ★★★★½ 7

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  I’ve been ruminating on Once Upon A Time In Anetolia for a bit now. What I can’t keep from popping into my mind is hearing this as a Hollywood pitch.

  “It’s a murder mystery road trip movie. A hard boiled tough as nails detective, cool as ice Doctor with a mysterious past, suspicious Prosecutor, and a supporting cast of dim-witted fun loving buddies take a midnight journey to find a body buried somewhere in a field with a fountain. Hilarity ensues when the drunken perpetrator can’t quite remember exactly what field and fountain it was. Through the course of the evening they all discover that their common bond is girl trouble. Enter the beguilingly beautiful “Cemile” that the group meets…

• 

  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★★ 8

  Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a film that investigates its characters' weaknesses from a leisurely distance as Turkish director and co-writer Nuri Bilge Ceylan forces them to evaluate their own missteps together with their own mortality. The narrative adopts the long route as it follows a group of men set out on a search for the body of a murdered victim buried somewhere in the rural Anatolian steppes.

  Fırat Tanış as Kenan, one of the suspects, having already confessed to the crime, claims not to recall the corpse's precise location as police officers and entourage drive him around to different places through the night, each area looking very similar to the last. While Ceylan preoccupies the men in…

• 

  Review by Lowe McKee 12

  I once had an English professor in college stress the importance of the first and last sentences in a novel. Words that often carry a more significant level of intention in the writing. You’ve got the kickoff, the tone setter, the establishing language, the first chance to draw in and hook the reader. And then you have the wrap up, the au revoir, the sequence of words the author presumably hopes will rattle around in your head as you close the book, leaving the world you were just immersed in to re-enter your own. Often, while visiting a bookstore, I like to grab a book off the shelf and read the first and last sentences. It’s a good way to…