105 minute running time… I like all of Ceylan’s movies, but this is arthouse stuff, a mainstream audience couldn’t make it 10 minutes in … life in Turkey reminds me a lot of life in China, the poverty, the urban/rural, secular/sacred divide, ancient empires, etc. I laughed when I watched the trailer for this because how can you make a trailer for these cerebral movies about nonevents and people’s inner lives and what it means to be alone?

I’m not going to give it a green-go and instead direct everybody to see Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which I think is Ceylan’s masterpiece.

Miraculously the Washington Post movie review links from ~15 years ago still work, and I always appreciated Stephen Hunter’s take on things before the internet killed his job. “That's what I think. And that's a Western secularist's view, unexpanded by any spiritual meaning.“ He was funny.