196 minute running time … yeah, 196 minutes, but this is Nuri Bilge Ceylan so he gets a pass … I watched it over two nights, like a double feature … talk talk talk, people bickering at each other in Turkish for over three hours, the joy. But I didn’t hate it, oddly. Ceylan basically makes the same movie over and over again with slight variations, and his masterpiece is Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which is truly great (I bought the Blu-ray for repeated viewings). If you like Ceylan, you’'ll enjoy Winter Sleep.

Dick Brody wasn’t thrilled: “Ceylan paces this thin dramatic sketch as if it were a Wagner opera, with ponderous pauses and fraught gazes yearning toward depths that the movie doesn’t reach.”

Zhuo-ning Su wrote this funny line in his review: “… the one thing that most conceivably justifies the awarding of the Palme d’Or, a hypnotic pull of the film that lulls you into a meditative trance, stems most likely also from the ceaseless conversations … the desperation a viewer feels when he checks to find there are still hours on the clock is also very real.”

Great line from Manohla Dargis’s really well-written review (she gets it): “… the movie can be classed as a character study although it often plays more like one of those spiritual autopsies that directors occasionally perform on their protagonists, gutting them with degrees of gravity, glee and precision and extracting flaws like diseased organs.”