by Indy Datta
Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest film was the joint winner – along with the Dardennes’ The Kid With a Bike – of the Grand Prix at last year’s Cannes film festival, and has since been widely acclaimed as his masterpiece. At the very least it is his most thematically expansive and formally ambitious work since his international breakthrough, 2002’s Distant. But as always with Ceylan, I find myself stranded uneasily between admiration and scepticism, dazzled by the technical mastery, unable to shake the suspicion that there’s less to the film than meets the eye, yet on some level aware that the failing is probably mine.
MostlyFilm 