Once upon a time in Anatolia

Drama. Starring Muhammet Uzuner and Taner Birsel. Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" is boring, but not in the usual way of boring movies. It is colossally, memorably and audaciously boring, but if you stick with it - and I am not advising this - something may happen. And the thing that may happen is that you will cease to feel that you are watching one of the most boring movies in history and begin to feel that you are part of the movie's world, that you are in Turkey, with a group of police and public officials, searching for a dead body in the Anatolian steppes; that you have been up all night, that you are really tired, that you know these guys, that this is your life, too. The cops have a suspect, who is supposed to locate the body of a murder victim, but the suspect was drunk at the time the body was buried, and so they keep driving from one location to the next, looking around, and sometimes the drives approximate real time. The camera is either in the car, tracking the completely meaningless conversations of the police, or it's outside, watching the headlights cut through the night. Really, they ought to try searching during the day, might be easier. The saving grace of the movie - except it doesn't save it, so let's just say the grace - is the lived-in performances and one genuinely great scene, two hours into the film, in which a prosecutor and a doctor have what, at first, is a casual conversation. And then, gradually, we realize, as do the characters, that something terrible and deep is being revealed. This scene demands great acting from Taner Birsel, as the prosecutor, and he delivers. So if you want to spend 150 minutes in suspended animation in order to see two minutes of brilliance, this is your ticket.