It is very sad but also very beautiful. (Particularly after snow flocks the gray-on-gray city.) There is one breathtaking moment, a scene involving a beached tanker in snow, that is merely the best of dozens of indelible fragments.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Jun 23, 2022

"Distant," that's more like a warning than a title . . . . The two leads will eventually clash, but not enough to make this offering worthy of sitting through.

| Jun 5, 2021

Ceylan's cinema affects a solipsism that leads to a heightened sense of one's own surroundings - thus creating not a slow cinema but an extremely attentive cinema.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 2, 2018

There is plenty to admire here, but the movie is a gaunt affair, with something ruinously washed-out about it.

| Dec 14, 2017

The tale has a deceptive, emotional complexity that builds to a surprisingly heartrending impact.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Sep 8, 2005

He'd love to mimic Antonioni and Ozu, but Ceylan still has much to learn about crafting quiet scenes

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 26, 2005

Deeply compassionate and frequently amusing, qualifying as a minor miracle of humanely observant filmmaking.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 28, 2005

A startlingly quiet film that is buoyed by a droll humor, splendid visuals and bittersweet reflections into the human condition.

| Original Score: A+ | Jan 18, 2005

It's bleak, yes, but it's beautiful in equal measure.

| Original Score: A | Oct 1, 2004

A beautifully made, unapologetically artistic piece of work.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 24, 2004

The film's extraordinary shifts from windswept sorrow ... to deadpan comedy ... are uniquely, triumphantly their maker's own.

| Sep 22, 2004

Ultimately, it becomes a movie about the feeling of being alive, the sensation of existence. It's a movie, in a way, about everything.

| Jul 23, 2004

Straightforward, droll, brutally honest and arresting, if somewhat stately in progress.

| Jul 23, 2004

For arthouse fans this should be a must - filled as it is with lingering shots, awkward silences and the growing weight of knowing that no character will end up smiling.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 16, 2004

Stuffed with unspoken thoughts and unspeakable feelings

| May 26, 2004

Films that insist on long periods of nothingness need to earn those periods.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 21, 2004

The cumulative force of so many quiet, unforced little moments add up, and it wasn't until a good hour after I'd seen the film that it really took hold of me.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 21, 2004

Few recent films have been so accomplished in capturing the way people drift through their lives, unable to communicate their emotions and feelings.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 18, 2004

There is no simple sense of uplift in Distant. But there is an exhilaration to revealing the human condition, and Ceylan is ever on the lookout.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 14, 2004

This is a movie that dares to ask a powerful question: What does it mean to be really alone? How does it look?

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | May 14, 2004