Bir zamanlar Anadolu'da 2011

Manohla Dargis, New York Times: 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. Read more

David Fear, Time Out: Anatolia wanders into an open-ended verbal bout between the laws of nature and the laws of man, yet the sense of actual musing, much less the mythic storytelling jokingly suggested by its title, dissolves from being to nothingness. Read more

Scott Tobias, AV Club: Ceylan's mesmerizing existential drama takes its time establishing the players and bringing their inner lives into focus. It's cinema as autopsy. Read more

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe: 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. Read more

Deborah Young, Hollywood Reporter: A long, slow haul but for the willing, a haunting journey into the heart of darkness in Turkish Anatolia. Read more

Sheri Linden, Los Angeles Times: A police procedural as existential inquiry, set in a remote dreamscape of mystery and foreboding. Read more

Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic: Ceylan'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. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: There is very little overt drama. The camera waits, and watches, like a vulture. Read more

Ella Taylor, NPR: 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. Read more

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: Gorgeous to look at, intriguing to think about and, at times, hard to sit through. Read more

V.A. Musetto, New York Post: Patient viewers will be rewarded, as long as they pay attention. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: Ceylan doesn't slap us with big dramatic moments, but allows us to live along with his characters as things occur to them. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: A subtle, gorgeous and mysterious allegory that may be Ceylan's masterwork to date. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: It is colossally, memorably and audaciously boring, but if you stick with it - and I am not advising this - something may happen. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: It is epic in its aims and achievements yet modest in its resources: some superb actors, stunning landscapes and a resonant, understated script. Read more

Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail: A gorgeously shot crime story with emotionally layered characters and an indelible atmosphere of unease. Read more

Dave Calhoun, Time Out: 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. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star: 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. Read more

Justin Chang, Variety: 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. Read more

J. Hoberman, Village Voice: 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. Read more

Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post: A movie of such dark, smoldering intensity that it's easy to forget that half of it takes place in near darkness. Read more