Movie Review: The colossal melancholy of Ceylan's 'About Dry Grasses'
by Jake Coyle
Mar 01, 2024
3 minutes
Nuri Bilge Ceylan makes long films, by movie standards, but short ones by Russian literature standards.
There may be no filmmaker more consciously working in a novelistic tradition. The director counts reading “Crime and Punishment” as a formative experience. His Palme d'Or-winning 2014 film “Winter Sleep” adapted a pair of short stories. But regardless of any direct correlations, Ceylan's films — colossal, existential, talky — reach for (and often attain) an enveloping vastness that recalls those big 19th century books. He sets thorny stories peppered with prickly philosophical questions against
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