Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSTrenque Lauquen.Absurdly early as it may seem, the Best of 2023 lists are starting to arrive. The New York Times published top tens by Manohla Dargis and Alissa Wilkinson (only her third published piece as the Times’s newest movie critic after an illustrious run at Vox), Vulture shared lists from Bilge Ebiri and Allison Willmore, and Richard Brody unveiled his impossible-to-hem-in roundup at the New Yorker (we’ll return to his list in the Readings section). There are some consensus picks—among them, Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, Showing Up, and Passages—but there’s an exciting sprawl overall. Meanwhile, Cahiers du Cinéma shared their top ten; Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen was their delightful, well-deserved sleeper choice for film of the year. But...
- 12/7/2023
- MUBI
Turkey’s Best International Feature Oscar entry “About Dry Grasses” defrosts the blurred lines between teacher and student, colleague and mentor, in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s epically ambitioned, Cannes award-winning drama.
IndieWire debuts the trailer for the film that follows an abusive teacher (Deniz Celiloğlu) as he grapples with living in icy Anatolia, including favoring one pupil (Ece Bağcı), and seeking solace with a fellow teacher.
Samet (Celiloğlu) is a young art teacher now in his fourth year of compulsory service in a remote village in Anatolia. After a turn of events he can hardly make sense of, as is the case of many a Ceylan character facing a void, he loses his hopes of escaping the grim life he seems to be stuck in. Will his encounter with Nuray, also a teacher, help him overcome his angst? Musab Ekici also stars as Samet’s roommate.
The film is directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan,...
IndieWire debuts the trailer for the film that follows an abusive teacher (Deniz Celiloğlu) as he grapples with living in icy Anatolia, including favoring one pupil (Ece Bağcı), and seeking solace with a fellow teacher.
Samet (Celiloğlu) is a young art teacher now in his fourth year of compulsory service in a remote village in Anatolia. After a turn of events he can hardly make sense of, as is the case of many a Ceylan character facing a void, he loses his hopes of escaping the grim life he seems to be stuck in. Will his encounter with Nuray, also a teacher, help him overcome his angst? Musab Ekici also stars as Samet’s roommate.
The film is directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan,...
- 11/28/2023
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
“The unsettled state of the industry is an unavoidable talking point these days, but my hope is that our festival, as it has done through its 61-year history, will serve as a reminder that the art of cinema is in robust health,” said Dennis Lim, the New York Film Festival’s director of programing and chair of the main slate selection committee, in a statement last month accompanying the announcement of the titles that will screen as part of the 61st edition of the esteemed festival. From Hollywood’s double strike chaos, to worries about artificial intelligence, to the ongoing threat that streaming poses to the theatrical model—if there was ever a time when we needed that reminder, it’s now.
While all the features in the main slate this year enjoyed their world premiere earlier in the year at Sundance, Berlinale, Cannes, Toronto, and beyond, many will have...
While all the features in the main slate this year enjoyed their world premiere earlier in the year at Sundance, Berlinale, Cannes, Toronto, and beyond, many will have...
- 9/27/2023
- by Slant Staff
- Slant Magazine
In his otherwise astute Cahiers du Cinéma review of About Dry Grasses, Josué Morel describes the main character of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest epic work, Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), as a frustrated, badly loved, and, at times, angry man, who’s “perhaps even a pedophile.” While it can be seductive, sometimes convenient, to reduce the ambivalence of a characterization to something so clear, the manner in which Morel pins Samet down constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of Ceylan’s commitment to capturing, among other things, the dimensions of child-adult and pupil-teacher relations in all their complexity.
About Dry Grasses involves a complaint about transgressive behavior by Samet toward one of his female students, 14-year-old Sevim (Ece Bagci), with whom he’s nurtured a caring bond within an institution where any expression of affection would be fundamentally at odds with its pedagogy and ethos. The plot of Ceylan’s film isn’t...
About Dry Grasses involves a complaint about transgressive behavior by Samet toward one of his female students, 14-year-old Sevim (Ece Bagci), with whom he’s nurtured a caring bond within an institution where any expression of affection would be fundamentally at odds with its pedagogy and ethos. The plot of Ceylan’s film isn’t...
- 9/7/2023
- by Diego Semerene
- Slant Magazine
Updated with latest: The Cannes Film Festival kicked off this year with opening-night movie Jeanne du Barry, and concluded Saturday evening with Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall scooping the Palme d’Or. Deadline was on the ground to watch all the key films. Here is a compilation of our reviews from the fest, which last year saw Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness win the coveted top prize on its way to an Oscar Best Picture nomination.
Check out the reviews below, click on the titles to read them in full, and keep checking back as we add more.
About Dry Grasses ‘About Dry Grasses’
Section: Competition
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Cast: Deniz Celiloglu, Ece Bagci, Merve Dizdar, Musab Ekici
Deadline’s takeaway: For Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s many fans, this is another opportunity to slip into his world, spot his sly political references and subside for a...
Check out the reviews below, click on the titles to read them in full, and keep checking back as we add more.
About Dry Grasses ‘About Dry Grasses’
Section: Competition
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Cast: Deniz Celiloglu, Ece Bagci, Merve Dizdar, Musab Ekici
Deadline’s takeaway: For Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s many fans, this is another opportunity to slip into his world, spot his sly political references and subside for a...
- 5/27/2023
- by Pete Hammond, Damon Wise, Matthew Carey, Stephanie Bunbury and Valerie Complex
- Deadline Film + TV
Cannes Review: About Dry Grasses is a Luminous Summation of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Soul-Stirring Cinema
The pastures in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s luminous new film are only dry at the very end. Save for that brief summery coda, the landscape in About Dry Grasses remains a snowcapped immensity where prairies are ringed by belittling peaks, people stand out as calligraphic silhouettes, and snow falls so heavy as to blot out everything. It’s as if it fell “to make oblivion possible,” observes art teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), and in a film populated with wanderers trying to start anew, those words echo like a prayer. Geographically and thematically close to the rest of Ceylan’s oeuvre, the film finds him working once again in a remote corner of Eastern Anatolia and revisiting leitmotifs in his preferred mode: long, talky symposiums that pit characters against each other in games of verbal fencing. But none of it feels like a retreading. If anything, About Dry Grasses is both...
- 5/27/2023
- by Leonardo Goi
- The Film Stage
The 2023 Cannes Film Festival is jam-packed with buzzy world premieres, from Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” to Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City.” Todd Haynes is also back to unveil “May December,” featuring the A-list pairing of Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, while Disney is bringing Harrison Ford to the Croisette for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” New films from Pedro Almodovar, Jessica Hautner, Jonathan Glazer, Catherine Corsini, Hirokazu Kore-eda and more are also set to make their debuts at Cannes this year.
Cannes is often seen as a launching pad for Oscar season. Warner Bros. in 2022 kicked off its lengthy awards run for Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” on the French Riviera, with the film going on to land eight Academy Award nominations, including best picture. Palme d’Or winner “Triangle of Sadness” also picked up Oscar nods for best picture, director and original screenplay. Two international film nominees,...
Cannes is often seen as a launching pad for Oscar season. Warner Bros. in 2022 kicked off its lengthy awards run for Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” on the French Riviera, with the film going on to land eight Academy Award nominations, including best picture. Palme d’Or winner “Triangle of Sadness” also picked up Oscar nods for best picture, director and original screenplay. Two international film nominees,...
- 5/24/2023
- by Zack Sharf
- Variety Film + TV
At nearly 200 minutes in length, “About Dry Grasses” (or “Kuru Otlar Üstüne”) is par for the course for Turkish virtuoso Nuri Bilge Ceylan. He returns, once again, to the icy frost of his Anatolia-set Palme d’Or winner “Winter Sleep,” for a story that beats with similar frustrations towards power in the grand social scheme. However, he weaves this theme into his background tapestry, favoring instead a talkative and often discomforting tale of a small-town art teacher, his 12-year-old female student, and an accusation of impropriety that might be false on its surface, but is rooted in truths the camera sees.
Where “Winter Sleep” adapted Russian greats like Chekhov and Dostoyevsky — it draws from both “The Wife” and “The Brothers Karamazov”— “About Dry Grasses” plays like a spiritual descendant of Nabokov’s “Lolita,” at least in its use of point-of-view. Ceylan’s novelistic approach to cinema could perhaps find no...
Where “Winter Sleep” adapted Russian greats like Chekhov and Dostoyevsky — it draws from both “The Wife” and “The Brothers Karamazov”— “About Dry Grasses” plays like a spiritual descendant of Nabokov’s “Lolita,” at least in its use of point-of-view. Ceylan’s novelistic approach to cinema could perhaps find no...
- 5/20/2023
- by Siddhant Adlakha
- Indiewire
Nuri Bilge Ceylan loves snow. The depths of winter, people in thick coats, frozen taps, the sense that these long, bitterly cold seasons in mountain regions will never end. This is all working material for the Turkish master whose Winter Sleep won the Palme d’Or in 2014. “What am I doing here?” is the regular moan from Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), the art teacher in the village school in About Dry Grasses.
Meaning: what is a man of the world doing teaching potato farmers’ children how to draw a horse? Why is he in this desolate country with two seasons that turn over so quickly that once the snow melts, the buried yellow grass almost immediately is turned brown by the fierce summer sun? Even the grass has no chance in life: It’s unbearable. It’s like him, he muses in a rare voice-over, condemned by circumstance to insignificance.
Ceylan...
Meaning: what is a man of the world doing teaching potato farmers’ children how to draw a horse? Why is he in this desolate country with two seasons that turn over so quickly that once the snow melts, the buried yellow grass almost immediately is turned brown by the fierce summer sun? Even the grass has no chance in life: It’s unbearable. It’s like him, he muses in a rare voice-over, condemned by circumstance to insignificance.
Ceylan...
- 5/20/2023
- by Stephanie Bunbury
- Deadline Film + TV
Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan continues to explore his homeland’s teeming dichotomies — city/rural, secularism/faith, individualism/tradition and so forth — in About Dry Grasses, his latest Cannes competition entrant, which revolves around schoolteachers in a remote rural community. Running true to recent form (see 2014 Palme d’Or winner Winter Sleep and 2018’s Cannes-entrant The Wild Pear Tree), despite the setting in contemporary Anatolia, this latest work nevertheless plays like an adaptation of some lost, weighty 19th-century Russian novel of ideas beloved by mid-20th existentialists and largely forgotten until Ceylan repurposed it.
Of course, that’s not the actual case, and the script was written by Ceylan himself, his wife and frequent collaborator Erbu Ceylan and Akin Aksu. All the same, the screenplay is distinctly opaque, despite the huge chunks of philosophical dialogue and debate it delivers. The film is edited in a seemingly deliberately raggedy style, with...
Of course, that’s not the actual case, and the script was written by Ceylan himself, his wife and frequent collaborator Erbu Ceylan and Akin Aksu. All the same, the screenplay is distinctly opaque, despite the huge chunks of philosophical dialogue and debate it delivers. The film is edited in a seemingly deliberately raggedy style, with...
- 5/19/2023
- by Leslie Felperin
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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