Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

5.00
    Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
    2011

    Synopsis

    In the rural area around the Anatolian town of Keskin, the local prosecutor, police commissar, and doctor lead a search for a victim of a murder to whom a suspect named Kenan and his mentally challenged brother confessed. However, the search is proving more difficult than expected as Kenan is fuzzy as to the body's exact location. As the group continues looking, its members can't help but chat among themselves about both trivia and their deepest concerns in an investigation that is proving more trying than any of them expected.

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    Cast

    • Muhammet UzunerDoktor Cemal
    • Yılmaz ErdoğanKomiser Naci
    • Taner BirselSavcı Nusret
    • Ahmet Mümtaz TaylanŞoför Arap Ali
    • Fırat TanışKenan
    • Ercan KesalMuhtar
    • Erol EraslanMurder Victim Yaşar
    • Burhan YıldızSuspect Ramazan
    • Murat KılıçPolice Officer İzzet
    • Şafak KaraliCourthouse Clerk Abidin

    Recommendations

    • 91

      IndieWire

      Nuri Bilge Ceylan's mesmerizing Once Upon a Time in Anatolia plays like "Zodiac" meets "Police, Adjective."
    • 91

      The A.V. Club

      The body means different things for each of them, and Ceylan's mesmerizing existential drama takes its time establishing the players and bringing their inner lives into focus. It's cinema as autopsy.
    • 90

      The 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.
    • 90

      Salon

      What a handful of patient moviegoers may find in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, however, is a subtle, gorgeous and mysterious allegory that may be Ceylan's masterwork to date.
    • 80

      Variety

      Though its glacial pacing will represent a significant hurdle for many viewers, the film grows steadily more involving as dawn breaks and the men make their way back home, and its unflinching observations of the legal and medical establishment at work frequently rivet. Visually, it's as gorgeous a film as Ceylan has made.
    • 80

      Village Voice

      A 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.
    • 70

      The Hollywood Reporter

      For those willing to take the plunge, it is a deep and haunting work that lingers in the memory.
    • 60

      Time Out

      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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