I'm sometimes tempted to make a big deal about the diminished status of foreign-language film, especially when it comes to cinema from unfamiliar countries and non-name-brand filmmakers. Once upon a time that kind of adventurousness represented a kind of cultural aspiration: Even people who never watched such movies vaguely knew they were supposed to, and felt defensive about it. (That defensiveness still comes up sometimes, as in the infamous "cultural vegetables" debate a couple of years ago.) Does this decline represent the xenophobic, self-centered, immediate-gratification quality of contemporary pop culture? Well, maybe. But I can't get too excited about it. There's only so much free time in our overworked lives, and a whole lot more watchable TV than there used to be. The number of people willing to break free of comfortable routine and seek out something like Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's intimate, spectacular and masterful new drama "Winter Sleep" is necessarily pretty small.I get it, believe me. If I hadn't spent years going to film festivals and being indoctrinated into a particular way of seeing, I probably wouldn't have heard of Ceylan either, nor would I look forward to each of his new movies with such eagerness. But now that I've tried to drive you away, let me lure you back: "Winter Sleep," winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, is not some impenetrable or arduous art film, full of ambiguous silences and featureless landscapes. (And I say that as someone who will willingly watch such a thing.) It's a gorgeous and luminous work, driven by amazing scenery and affecting human tragedy, that captures the themes driving Ceylan's work and the peculiar cultural status of Turkey, a nation that literally straddles the border between the secular West and the Islamic world. Give this mysterious wide-screen experience 10 minutes, and it absolutely will not let you go. (I'm not going to tell you the daunting running time in precise terms; let's just say you should have dinner first.)Like Ceylan's last film, the slo-mo police drama "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" (also amazing, but admittedly a more demanding a viewing experience), "Winter Sleep" is set along a kind of internal border within Turkey, where the nation's educated, Westernized elite encounters deeply rooted traditional culture. Its central character – it would be a stretch to call him the hero – is a retired actor named Aydin, played by Haluk Bilginer, himself an eminent Turkish stage and screen actor who's also done numerous roles in English (including five years on the British soap "EastEnders"). Aydin is a prominent landlord and hotel proprietor in a remote village of Cappadocia, the high plateau of central Anatolia that's loaded with archaeological and geographical splendors and famous for its wild horses. He has a much younger wife named Nihal (the gorgeous Melisa Sözen) who has clearly fallen out of love with him, an embittered divorced sister named Necla (Demet Akbag), and an increasingly acrimonious relationship with an impoverished tenant family who haven't paid their rent in months. Soak all of that in booze, snow, egotism and genteel decay, and it's a combustible combination.I described "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" as an episode of "CSI" transported to the Turkish outback and rewritten by Anton Chekhov, and while the influence was obvious it was a better guess than I realized. "Winter Sleep" is actually adapted from a story by Chekhov, who was obsessed by many of the same intertwined issues of class, caste, property and history that preoccupy Ceylan. While "Winter Sleep" never seems "political" in the narrow or most obvious sense, Aydin's predicament has everything to do with Turkey's peculiar status between East and West, hemmed in on one side by godless European amorality and on the other by the fiery sword of jihad. One of Aydin's deadbeat tenants is an imam (Serhat Mustafa Kiliç), who is embarrassingly servile to Aydin's face and then curses him behind his back. The imam's brother, an unemployed ex-con named Ismail (Nejat Isler), is less hypocritical, and views Aydin and his wife with a sardonic, predatory intensity that points toward a shocking final confrontation.It's Ismail's preteen son who provides the most obvious inciting incident, breaking Aydin's windshield with a stone in an effort to avenge his father's humiliation. But if that event didn't send these people on a downward spiral, something else would have. There is also Aydin's deepening suspicion that Nihal is having an affair, his thwarted desire to purchase and tame one of the region's wild horses, and his attempt to forge a friendship with a visiting motocross biker who is spending a few days in the hotel. He has settled into the archetypal big-frog-small-pond-role as an eminent citizen of Nowheresville, airing his private grievances in a bitter newspaper column read by no one except his hostile sister, increasingly confronted with his unfulfilled dreams and his deepening unhappiness.But if Aydin is a merciless lampoon of the disempowered intellectual, and perhaps a distorted artistic self-portrait (Ceylan is a 55-year- old filmmaker married to a younger woman; his wife, Ebru, has co-written his last three films), the work that surrounds him is a dense social tapestry, where the intimate, firelit interiors and the severe, astonishing landscape form a symphonic counterpoint. Ceylan and cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki have forged an artistic collaboration that may drive film-studies theses of the future; the obvious corollary would be the long partnership between Sven Nykvist and Ingmar Bergman, another artist whose influence runs strong in Ceylan's films.If I'm called upon to tell you what "Winter Sleep" is about, then the correct answer is not that it's about an aging actor's failing marriage or the class wars of a snowbound tourist village. And yes, it's "about" Turkey, but I guarantee you that Ceylan would not claim some variety of human experience can be found in Turkey that is not found in Oklahoma or Brazil.

An epic, great film, one of the masterpieces of cinema of all times. The acting is absolutely fantastic, the actors actually take a grip of the viewer and one cannot but be bewitched by them. The setting in Anatolia and shots are great, contrasting greatly with Western cinema so full of clichés and stereotypes about relationships. Each scene is like a painting, a painting which breathes of life, simplicity, and complexity at the same time. The story is to be understood on multiple levels, yet there are great questions to be answered probably only after the film has finished, it contains probably some of the great themes of humanity, all surrounded by the great enigma we call 'life'. A great film for all times.

First of all let me tell you my complete disbelief of such a high rating for this movie. I try to understand why people would give it such a high rating but I must be too dumb to get it because honestly this movie is so boring I had to watch in three times and even then I almost fell asleep three times. Don't get me wrong, the actors are all good, the filming is good as well. But it doesn't matter if you have the best actors possible or the worst actors possible, if you make a movie about the extremely boring life of extremely boring people then you get an extremely boring movie. And if you make a movie that last for more then three hours about nothing then you get an extremely long boring movie. Because let me tell you, and here is a spoiler, so if you want to stop reading this review before I spoil it for you then this is the moment. This movie is about nothing and it last more then three hours. Unbelievable people like that kind of nonsense. I simply don't get it.

There were times during this film when I felt I had slipped into a filmed Chekhov play along the lines of Anthony Hopkins' "August"(1996). However, this film has a rhythm and vitality few films of Chekhov have offered. The exotic setting accounts for some of this. Mr. Bilginer's magnetism, conveyed in his husky voice and exquisitely trained eyes, lifts every scene he is in to a high level of tension and engagement.This is not a moralistic film, in my opinion. It is, as the castrating Necla says while needling her brother, "realistic". It displays human nature with its flaws without harsh commentary. The characters themselves do all the judging and muddling. Nihal feels she is a strangled Desdemona despite her accommodating Othello's (Aydin's) tolerance of her youthful angst. Necla lives off her brother and resents it. Aydin is an enabler and insecure in his own worth.Aydin is the misunderstood patriarch. He doesn't even understand that he is a patriarch, no matter what good he feels he is doing. He fails to see the real context of his part on the stage of his environment. He is the gentrified landlord, but sees himself as an innocent businessman in a system he did not create. Nihal fails to understand her charity is selfish and lacks human understanding. Necla talks about not resisting evil as a good thing, because she cannot resist her own evil sadism toward those around her.This is perhaps the first film of this length which I was truly sorry to see end. I was not tired of the characters or the setting. I could not have imagined I would feel this way about a film about winter in Turkey.