Short Cuts

The glacier-slow, painstakingly considered films of Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan are a blessed relief from the crash-bang-wallop of the multiplexes. Nevertheless, they are an acquired taste.

His new film, Three Monkeys, which won the best director award at Cannes in 2008, follows the similarly lauded Uzak and Climates in telling a superficially straightforward story of contemporary Turkish life. But, as in his previous films, deep, dank pits lie just beneath the glistening ...