Cinephiles will rejoice at the arrival of an art-house event movie, and the return of Ceylan’s painterly eye and stark philosophy. His grip can be hypnotic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 7, 2024

Tiptoes around the edge of being suffocatingly verbose, and there are scenes that could stand a tighter edit. Still, the meaty, novelistic writing and exceptional quality of the performances make for a rich and engrossing viewing experience.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 29, 2024

The vigorous, masterful script, written by the director his wife and frequent collaborator Ebru Ceylan, counterpoints the extended runtime. The director says he could have made the film longer; remarkably, most viewers will agree.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 27, 2024

It would be a waste to see About Dry Grasses anywhere other than on the largest screen, in the darkest cinema. It not only repays the time, it makes a change of pace nothing less than a moral recalibration.

| Jul 25, 2024

Hope, disappointment, self-discovery: they’re all in here, along with, in the end, the dry grasses. Some will consider the film a masterpiece; others an ordeal. I’d lean towards the former but would also offer this advice: take sandwiches.

| Jul 25, 2024

This would be a great double feature with The Teacher's Lounge (2023).

| Mar 22, 2024

Even by Ceylan’s stringent standards, “About Dry Grasses” is a dour and enveloping affair, featuring one of his most complicated and, ultimately, despicable protagonists. That isn’t initially apparent, but it’s bracingly clear by the end.

| Mar 6, 2024

Between’s Ceylan’s eye for faces, landscapes and spatial dynamics, and the first-rate work of cinematographers Kürsat Üresin and Çevahir Sahin, “About Dry Grasses” fills every widescreen frame with life.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 2, 2024

I wouldn’t trust any one reading of About Dry Grasses, even my own. It contains too many multitudes for that.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 1, 2024

Structured like a quietly grand novel, subtle and elliptical, Ceylan’s film unfolds with Chekhovian grace and a cutting understanding of character.

| Feb 28, 2024

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan spends his latest engrossingly verbose, three-hour opus, “About Dry Grasses,” warning us that every truth is partial as it’s tinged with the teller’s perspective.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 23, 2024

“About Dry Grasses” may be unhurried, with languid steppe-by-steppe pacing and long, luxuriant, exquisitely sculpted conversations, but it is also nimble, alert, and alive in ways that seem to have taken Ceylan himself by surprise.

| Feb 23, 2024

A stark window into the conflicted soul of his homeland, whose tensions and schisms are subtly evoked throughout the course of this challenging, if ultimately rich and rewarding, 197-minute import of longing, resentment, compromise, and self-interest.

| Feb 23, 2024

About Dry Grasses is characteristically extravagant and tiny at the same time, like a 10-story museum devoted to paper clips.

| Feb 23, 2024

About Dry Grasses is Ceylan’s longest film to date. It’s also among the most hypnotic works of his career, and certainly one of the best movies of this or any other year.

| Dec 9, 2023

Above all, the film captures how easy it is to deposit too much hope on the few who represent dissent, or freedom, when one is trapped.

| Original Score: 3.5 | Sep 7, 2023

It’s a gorgeous film, in Ceylan’s typical naturalistic style, and one that follows the novelistic impulse, complete with a self-absorbed antihero at its center.

| May 31, 2023

Yes, the screenplay is as wordy as usual for this director, with dialogue scenes that ramble on for upwards of 10 minutes. But just as the characters use talk to build up their defences, the camera slyly unpicks them.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 30, 2023

About Dry Grasses is as serious as you’d expect from Ceylan, but there’s also a self-reflective, playful angle to this one, and a seam of black humour that’s been missing from his recent films.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 25, 2023

Among the most brilliantly off-putting works to be featured at Cannes in recent years.

| Original Score: B+ | May 22, 2023