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Distant
Universal acclaim
Based on 18 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 12 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Foreign
Written by: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Directed by: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Release Date:
Theatrical: March 12, 2004
DVD: March 22, 2005
Running Time: 110 minutes, Color
Origin: Turkey
Summary
RATING: Not Rated
Starring Muzaffer Özdemir, Emin Toprak, Zuhal Gencer Erkaya, Nazan Kirilmis, Feridun Koc, Fatma Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan, and Ebru Yapici
A photographer who is haunted by the feeling that the gap between his ideals and his real life is growing finds himself obliged to put up in his apartment a young relative who has left behind his village looking for a job aboard a ship in Istanbul to go abroad.
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Ceylan, who also served as cinematographer, frames the affecting, unstudied performances in gorgeously chosen shots and nonevents that sometimes teeter on the edge of comedy before knocking us breathless with their emotional power.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
Mood, atmosphere, and character are more important than story twists in this unassuming, acutely observant drama.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
The narrative, capped by a brief bad dream and the capture of a mouse, isn't always legible, but it feeds into a monumental, luminous visual style like no other.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
The compositions are masterful, especially the snow-covered scenes in Istanbul and, most memorably, the spectacle of an overturned ship in the wintry harbor.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
Straightforward, droll, brutally honest and arresting.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
The film's extraordinary shifts from windswept sorrow (Mahmut watching from a distance as his ex-wife departs Istanbul for a new life in Canada) to deadpan comedy (the cousins' carefully engineered capture of a household rodent) are uniquely, triumphantly their maker's own.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
A beautifully made, unapologetically artistic piece of work.
Read Full Review >Variety David Stratton
An arthouse film par excellence, a consummately made study of loneliness and frustration.
Read Full Review >New York Post V.A. Musetto
If "Starsky & Hutch" is your idea of art, keep your distance from Distant, the droll new movie from maverick Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. If, on the other hand, you're searching for something that will remain with you long after leaving the theater, run, don't walk, to Distant.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
There's also very little dialogue, but what there is is often very funny, and Ceylan is a master of the dead-pan visual gags that reveal volumes about his character.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
What is most winning about Distant is that it can peer past the grief and find a scrap of comedy. [15 March 2004, p. 154]
New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman
Long stretches go by without dialogue or discernible action. But there are significant rewards for those willing to accept the movie's deliberate pace.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
A movie like this touches everyday life in a way that we can recognize as if Turkey were Peoria. I can imagine a similar film being made in America, although Americans might talk more.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Jonathan Curiel
A minimalist drama that takes its mood from Turkey's wintry terrain and the uneasy relationship between two bullheaded cousins.
Read Full Review >The New York Times A.O. Scott
Such an accurate depiction of cramped spirits, small-mindedness and men unable to make changes in their lives takes its toll. Distant feels as if it's going nowhere in no particular hurry, and finally leaves us distant from its characters.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
The film might be called a moral travelogue. Instead of showing us mosques and tourist spots in beguiling old Istanbul, it follows a couple of ordinary Turkish men in drab surroundings and affirms that they breathe the same doubt-laden air as much of the rest of the world.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.9 (out of 10) based on 12 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Dan C. gave it a6:
Beautiful and highly emotionally effective in parts, but the price to be paid is too high. Long stretches of no dialogue, no action, nothing but beautiful visuals or ponderously serious scenes of a man walking silently across a field.A film doesn't have to be so slow and take itself so seriously to be great or to say something important about life. At some point, the intentionally glacial pace becomes self-indulgent on the director's part. Yet somewhere within this flawed framework is a moving story with genuine power to captivate the viewer.
Hal B gave it a9:
Happened across this in the video store. Intrigued by the cover reviews, decided to check it out. Starts very slowly, but after a while it dawned on me that the director was painting a wonderful, beautiful, sad canvas... against the backdrop of the legendary city of Instanbul, hauntingly gorgeous in its wintry cloak. The photography and the performances are fantastic. A truly amazing film for those patient enough to be led through it.
Vince H. gave it a9:
Beautiful and haunting study of isolation and loneliness by a soon-to-be-master filmmaker. The way Ceylan shoots Emin Toprak's adventures around Istanbul (following women, sitting next to one on the train, etc.) is a beautiful and truly real moment of what loneliness feels like. Ceylan gets to the real core and heart of his characters as welll as feelings. In this sense, he is closest to directors like Tsai Ming-Liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien in style and technique than the much-compared Tarkvosky.
Ken L gave it a2:
Long, slow, dull and and self-indulgent. Ceylan breaks the cardinal rule of film-makers...he shows boredom by boring his audience. zzzzzz.
Andy R. gave it a4:
I don't get it. I really don't. How can anyone rate this as nearly perfect? Great shots, yes. But does that equal a good/perfect movie?
Brian C. gave it a9:
Hauntingly beautiful and anchingly painful. Cinema at its best.
Dan S. gave it a10:
Yep, the slowest, dullest movie in history for slow and dull people. Otherwise, if you've got an ouce of culture in you, and an interest in some of the bigger questions in life, then, well you might even enjoy this film a little. Maybe even get a little bit ecstatic about it. And I know that I am not alone in this. HA!
