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.… Collapse

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.… Expand

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.… Expand

Long, slow, dull and and self-indulgent. Ceylan breaks the cardinal rule of film-makers...he shows boredom by boring his audience. zzzzzz.

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?

Hauntingly beautiful and anchingly painful. Cinema at its best.

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!

A movie of non-events is putting it mildly. It's been a long time since I've looked at my watch so many times during a movie. I considered leaving, but thought that maybe the depression would turn into something uplifting if I stayed long enough. It didn't. The elderly Turkish gentleman next to me clapped when the final credits appeared - he told me it was because the movie was over. The only reason I can give it a 6 is because the cinematography was excellent.… Expand

The slowest dullest movie in history.