WATCH PARTY: Winter Sleep (2014) dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan @ Richard Tucker Library

I have been working my way through this Turkish director's films and they are getting increasingly more and more dynamic (but you need to have a bit of patience with the slow build.)

RUNTIME: 196 minutes

SYNOPSIS: A retired actor has inherited a small hotel where he is ensconced with his recently divorced sister, his much younger and growingly discontented wife. A seemingly trivial incident sets in motion a drama of personalities at odds with each other and the paths their lives have taken. The superb cast of actors quickly takes your attention and won't let it go.

Directed by the Turkish cinema master, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, this enthralling, brilliantly photographed film won the top prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and was Turkey's entrant in the Oscar Best Foreign Language Film category. Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia had shared the top prize at Cannes in 2011. Set in the amazingly picturesque Cappadocia region in central Turkey, the exterior scenes strikingly capture the remarkable topography a World Heritage site while the interior scenes bring Rembrandt to mind.

BLURBS:
**"**Nuri Bilge Ceylan is at the peak of his powers with Winter Sleep, a richly engrossing and ravishingly beautiful magnum opus that surely qualifies as the least boring 196-minute movie ever made." - Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

"My favorite movie of 2014 is three hours long, and it's about Turkish people who live in caves." - Ella Taylor, NPR

"Again it's glorious; again it's talky; again its insights sear; again its length is remorseless. Again it's the best thing to be seen in any city or country where it's showing." - Nigel Andrews, Financial Times