Critics reviews

Ceylan takes great care to ground [the film's] rhetorical flights in a concrete landscape, mapping the whole of the terrain crossed in a variety of cadenced camera gestures, conveying an aliveness to the environment and the specifics of topography that makes the film’s occasional unannounced slippages between lived and dreamed experience all the more jarring.

The Wild Pear Tree could be described as an extended picaresque conversation piece, though that risks making it sound incoherent, uneven or pretentious, none of which epithets are appropriate to Ceylan’s characteristically Chekhovian gem.

[The Wild Pear Tree] is undeniably long, talky and dense, but it is never uninteresting. You might call it slow too, though at the risk of mischaracterizing the speed of its verbiage and the dizzying complexity of its ideas.

“The Wild Pear Tree” is among Ceylan’s richest films, embellished with both local specificities and deeply Turkish concerns about art, politics and the social divide between cities and rural towns... Along the way, it lands on something universal about anyone who once settled down with a reality, seemingly lesser than the towering ambitions chased during youthful years of uncompromising purpose.

It’s defiantly cerebral — resistant to summary, classification and perhaps easy comprehension as well

The Wild Pear Tree takes a leisurely approach to narrative that’s both intensely dialogical and transfixingly visual, and one would have as much trouble pegging down its genre as Sinan has describing the eponymous book of essays he’s trying publish.

At its best, The Wild Pear Tree captures not just the feeling, but also the process of coming to terms with one’s place in society—and that, if nothing else, requires patience.

[It] may seem daunting, those patient or curious enough to see it will have their good faith pay off in emotional spades, for this is a film whose piercing potency slowly creeps up on you, burrows into your psyche, and lingers long after the film’s final frame.

Ceylan’s latest two films [. . . take] us hostage within introverted narratives that shovel ideas down our throats. I consider this a step backwards, since in a country where our voices are crushed every day, cinema should be an open-air pavilion that expands our consciousness of ourselves and of the horrific events surrounding us.

The Wild Pear Tree isn’t “about” much more than what Sinan will do with his life... But Ceylan expertly draws your eye and ear to the drama behind the drama, and gives the most gently naturalistic scenes the weight and grain of visions. The word visionary has been flogged by the film business to the point of redundancy, but with The Wild Pear Tree, Ceylan reminds us he has earned every letter of it.

The result is a film that I found more admirable than likeable. Certainly its portrait of Sinan captures a certain recognizable type of self-assured, stubborn character, and there is a certain humor in that portrayal. . . . I found the ending a bit too pat and easy.

Simultaneously static and ambulatory, Sinan spends much of the time trying to find a publisher for his ambitious novel, from which the film takes its title—another self-reflexive move on Ceylan’s part, who has succeeded in translating to screen the experience of being engrossed by a particularly discursive, verbose, and occasionally hubristic novel.