Too surreal and symbolic to fully connect with mainstream cinema audiences, but lovers of challenging festival films will be captivated
Comment
08/29/08
Times and Winds (2008)
86
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:36
Fresh:31
Rotten:5
Average Rating:7.1/10
Consensus: Lilting and meditative, Reha Erdem's story of three adolescents in rural Turkey captivates with intimate details and long takes of the endless countryside.
Theatrical Release:29-08-2008
Synopsis: The intensely lyrical TIMES AND WINDS, winner of both the FIPRESCI and Best Turkish Film Awards at the 2006 Istanbul Film Festival, is the fourth feature from director Reha Erdem. The film depicts... [More]
Reviews for Times and Winds
Though painfully slow to ignite and poetically portentous on occasions, Reha Erdem’s film about three children growing up in a remote Anatolian village, isolated by high mountains, has an impressive edge to it.
08/29/08
The film is concerned with observing the passage of time, the change in the light, the immemorial contours of the landscape, and, in one shot, a very touching pieta of a boy and his new baby sibling. Compelling stuff if you can stay with it.
08/29/08
We’ve seen this kind of picturesque rural drama before, but director Reha Erdem still hews a rich poetry from the material. The story’s elegantly structured around the five daily calls-to-prayer given from a parapet with stunning views.
08/29/08
Difficult, frustrating, but engrossing and ultimately enriching, make time to see it.
08/29/08
But it's Erdem's unsentimental compassion towards his characters, his fidelity to the rhythms of their lives and the arcs of their imaginations, that gives this film its wondrous power and depth.
08/29/08
Top CriticTimes and Winds is a remarkable piece of work, conceived at the highest pitch of intelligence: it is a cinematic poem, replete with fear and rapture, and one of the best films of the year.
08/29/08
Top CriticIt is, at a guess, about life’s relentless march, about death, rebirth, and the hollow limits of religion in the face of overwhelming nature. You have to see it to get it, but when you’ve got it you’ve got it for good.
08/29/08
Top CriticA lyrical yet unsentimental vision of childhood, directed with striking assurance by Erdem.
08/29/08
Top CriticBuried in leaves or hugging the rocks, they could be in ecstatic communion or fusing with the natural world. More likely, Erdem’s marvellous film sees them as bridging the divide between heaven and earth.
08/29/08
Top CriticA toughly touching insight into the pain of growing up.
08/29/08
Top CriticClick to read the article
04/23/09
An earthy, cruelly honest dream-wander through the physical and emotional awakenings of three young teenagers whose lives are shaped and constrained by the rural rhythms of their remote mountain village.
10/29/08
Erdem’s script and his young cast do a fine job of recalling the years between carefree childhood (embodied by Omer’s brother, the precocious and adorable Ali) and adult power and duties.
10/18/08
in a film both as banal, and as miraculous, as the endlessly repeating metamorphoses that it portrays, time does not so much heal old wounds as reopen them in new bodies - and the result is a vision that sets human progress against eternal return.
09/03/08
Everything in Times and Winds glides by like a dream. Or perhaps, the dreamlike tone reminds us that we'll never know such hardship.
08/16/08
Leisurely paced and beautifully lensed, yet reveals hard truths about human frailty in the face of social and familial ills.
06/16/08
Deriving its power and poignancy in small doses rather than from any false sense of drama, this contemplative and quiet look at life...is an accomplished piece of arthouse cinema.
06/13/08
Though modestly plotted and deliberately paced, Times and Winds is a hypnotic look at life in a remote village on Turkey's northwest coast.
06/13/08
Top CriticSubtly unsettling yet fascinating.
03/14/08
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