Times and Winds.

"Times and Winds is a film bewitched by the rhythms of everyday life in a remote Turkish village," writes Ed Gonzalez in the Voice. "Director Reha Erdem sees pain and love the same way he does the moon and sun - as constant, illuminating forces - and his camera pushes forward as if on an axis, peering at family and communal experience through the impressionable eyes of three pre-adolescents."

"This is definitely one for the arthouse snobs, but it's also a surprisingly sensitive look at the inner lives of bored, rural Turkish youth," writes Armin Rosen in the L Magazine. "The children are as complex as the social and physical landscape they're set against, and the film slowly amounts to a rich, compelling whole."

Updated through 1/13.

"For all its beauty," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times, "you couldn't describe Times and Winds as uplifting, and its attitude toward childhood is not sentimental in the manner of similarly minimalist Iranian movies. Its vision of people in thrall to religious ritual and living at the mercy of nature may be poetic, but it is no idyll."

At Anthology Film Archives through January 17.

Update, 1/13: "If I tell you that it's a lovely, lyrical film about children's lives in a remote Turkish village, with long contemplative shots of natural beauty, that sends you in one direction," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "If I haul out comparisons to art-house heavyweights like Abbas Kiarostami and Theo Angelopoulos, that may send you in another. Let's say that from the first frames of Times and Winds I felt completely captivated, and that Erdem's shots of curtains blowing in a window, or three men having an argument in a field, have a hypnotic power that's not easily summarized."

Posted by dwhudson at January 11, 2008 11:14 AM