Reseñas de la crítica

There's a profound, unresolvable melancholy to “About Dry Grasses” that's hard to shake... But I wouldn't trust any one reading of “About Dry Grasses,” even my own. It contains too many multitudes for that.

“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.

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. Even our own conclusions on the state of the world and our role in it must be scrutinized, since neither hope nor despair should be fully believed.

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.

Like most every scene in About Dry Grasses, the sequence is compelling, even thrilling in isolation. It’s the bigger picture that disappoints.

Ceylan has been acclaimed by critics and festivals over the course of his eight-film career, and he is still able to surprise with such moments of complexity.

In “About Dry Grasses,” Ceylan is asking a vital question of himself as well as the audience: What does it mean to be engaged in the world? And if you choose to back away and watch, rather than become involved, is it self-protection, superiority or just cowardice?

But 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.

Samet’s arc, from pathetically arrogant man-child to not-a-totally-selfish prick, is satisfying, but it’s the women of About Dry Grasses who carry the epic...

NURI BILGE CEYLAN loves scoundrels of an artistic bent. There is no other way to explain the preponderance of louts, misanthropes, and creeps who have populated the films made over his three-decade career... But the lead of About Dry Grasses (2023), Ceylan’s newest Anatolian saga, takes the cake in the jerk contest.

About Dry Grasses is just as much about the harshness of a landscape, which mirrors the spirit of its inhabitants, as it is about a barrage of much more elusive things, rendered tangible by an incredible aesthete’s hands: jealousy, shame, intellectual mediocrity, and patriarchy’s most vicious of tacit pacts.

About Dry Grasses is both a distillation of Ceylan’s recurrent tropes and a purification of his style, a film made of conversations that remain explosive even at their most forbidding, shivering with a sense of fluid emotions constantly at play.