Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Reviews
Top CriticCeylan's own growing reputation will, I hope, continue to grow. He uses the realistic film as an avenue to what lies around and beyond the realism.
It runs 157 minutes, and I can't say you don't feel them. You do - but in the way you would, reading a very good book in an uncomfortable chair.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A movie of such dark, smoldering intensity that it's easy to forget that half of it takes place in near darkness.
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| Original Score: 4/4
A police procedural as existential inquiry, set in a remote dreamscape of mystery and foreboding.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
Ceylan's visual style is less heightened, more down-to-earth than the more stylised 'Three Monkeys', but still some of the night-time scenes look like careful paintings, such is the precision of their lighting and composition.
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| Original Score: 5/5
Ceylan doesn't slap us with big dramatic moments, but allows us to live along with his characters as things occur to them.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It is epic in its aims and achievements yet modest in its resources: some superb actors, stunning landscapes and a resonant, understated script.
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| Original Score: 4/4
A gorgeously shot crime story with emotionally layered characters and an indelible atmosphere of unease.
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| Original Score: 4/4
This painstaking but gorgeously realized police procedural by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish poet of the long take, nods to Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It is colossally, memorably and audaciously boring, but if you stick with it - and I am not advising this - something may happen.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Ceylan is as calculatedly withholding a storyteller as ever, and as one might expect, Anatolia never comes right out and explains itself, though the men's free-ranging conversations suggest the film has much on its mind.
A long, slow haul but for the willing, a haunting journey into the heart of darkness in Turkish Anatolia.
Gorgeous to look at, intriguing to think about and, at times, hard to sit through.
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| Original Score: 3/5
A subtle, gorgeous and mysterious allegory that may be Ceylan's masterwork to date.
Turn the movie this way, and it's a police procedural that's tragicomically heavy on minutiae while slyly suggesting that official evidence always lies. Turn it that way, and it's an existential fairy tale set in a nocturnal netherworld.
There's too much beauty and ballast in the movie's early stages to dismiss Ceylan's cerebral cop drama, and too much genuine banality in its latter acts to justify a sluggish slouch into the shallow end.
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| Original Score: 3/5
There is very little overt drama. The camera waits, and watches, like a vulture.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Patient viewers will be rewarded, as long as they pay attention.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A metaphysical road movie about life, death and the limits of knowledge, "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" has arrived just in time to cure the adult filmgoer blues.
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| Original Score: 4/5
157-minute police procedural at once sensuous and cerebral, profane and metaphysical, "empty" and abundant, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is closer to the Antonioni of L'Avventura, and it elevates the 52-year-old director to a new level of achievement.
