Gutsycurene Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Hattie I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Kaan Özgül I am not the best reviewer nor the best English speaker but pleas hear my words. I think Nuri Bilge Ceylan is awesome, I actually liked his last two movies. After watching Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Winter Sleep and seeing this movie on YMS's (a movie reviewer, you-tuber) list i gave it a shot.I felt like even the Turkish TV shows could tell this story faster. (They took 2 hours per episode and at least 2 season) This movie feels like a photography slayt, most of time nothing happens on those great shoots. Characters and story itself wasn't interesting at all. I love those depressed, static scenes but it was exaggerated in this movie and it didn't gave the results like Chan-wook Park's movies does. I am sure a lot of people quoted this before but "Drama is life with the dull bits cut out." -A.H, Which in this movie there were only dull bits.There wasn't enough characters nor events, the ones we got were very undeveloped and uninteresting. You may think because the writer wanted to make it 'a cut from real life' but he didn't stick with that either. The ending was awfully cringe-worthy, i am not going to give spoilers because this should be read before watching that disaster. But if you watch it you'll see that characters can not be placed in to anywhere. They are acting randomly e.g. "I am a very nice person but i am going to be very rude in just this scene for NO reason." At least his next movies were having more interesting stories but still pretty boring. Maybe he can start taking some risks at some point. Because Turkish cinema is awful and this guy is like a treasure to us.

cgyford Critically acclaimed Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan ("Distant" & "Climates") cemented his previous success with this slow-burning neo-noir which won him the Best Director Award at the 61st Cannes Film Festival and was Turkey's unsuccessful submission for the 81st Academy Awards' Best Foreign Language Film Oscar amongst a slew of Yeşilçam Awards and international film accolades.When family man Eyüp (Yavuz Bingöl) goes to prison for a hit-and-run committed by his wannabe politician boss Servet (Ercan Kesal), his wife Hacer (Hatice Aslan) and wayward son İsmail (Ahmet Rıfat Şungar) find their lives beginning to fall apart, and the process is only expedited by Eyüp's release some nine months later.Popular Turkish folk singer Yavuz Bingöl presents a wonderfully hunched and dishevelled presence at the head of a family that features the haggard beauty of Hatice Aslan and the angst ridden brow of Ahmet Rıfat Şungar who both won Yeşilçam Awards as well as the occasional unwelcome interference of sweaty co-writer Ercan Kesal.The Yeşilçam Award-winning cinematography of Gökhan Tiryaki ("Alone" & "Climates") transforms Istanbul into a suitably dark and brooding backdrop for the bare-bone story-line of Nuri Bilge Ceylan et al, but the dark beauty of the cinematography isn't quite enough to hold attention and the film begins to drag long before the leaden denouement."Do we have anyone else?"

timmy_501 The three monkeys in the title of this film refer to both the classic "See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil" maxim and to the compact family of three depicted in the film. These three characters are Eyup, his wife Hacer, and their son Ismail. Each of these people seem to live by the maxim of the monkeys so much that they hardly talk to each other at all. Events unfold with a tragic inevitability after Eyup agrees to confess to a crime committed by his boss Servet to shield him from political disgrace in exchange for a large payoff. The shattered family then attempts to go on about their lives as if nothing had ever happened, even when more things do happen. Problems that normally would be relatively routine when faced by a united family thus become a devastating cycle that threatens to destroy their lives.The material here is good but it likely would have devolved into histrionic melodrama in the hands of a less restrained director. Ceylan is a minimalist and as such he tends to allow the actions of the character to speak for themselves. In a way the lack of exposition puts the viewer in a similar situation to that of the family; we don't know exactly what they are thinking either.Ceylan's greatest strength is in visuals: his landscapes look unlike anyone else's. The colors are often desaturated; I generally think this visual technique is a mistake but it looks great in his films. Like all Ceylan films, Three Monkeys is worth seeing for the indescribable visuals alone, but this film in particular also offers a perfectly executed family tragedy. Ceylan really outdid himself this time, this is one of the best films of the decade.

anirban1985 If you look close enough into a human face, chances are that in nine cases out of ten, you would successfully read the directions of his thoughts. And if you happen to know his situation, that chance borders more on the tenner. "Three monkeys" by Nuri Bilge Ceylan exploits this very power of the viewer and virtually transports him straight into the characters' mind, simply by taking the camera far close to their faces than any decency would allow. And then, the viewer knows -- he knows the son's accusations of his mother before they actually come, he knows the pop's extreme distaste towards his wife so much so that when he does not lift a finger to dissuade his wife from taking the plunge, the viewer does not find himself unprepared for it. So very few verbal exchanges actually take place within the family, and yet, the wheels grinding are as clear as the day. This ploy goes back to Bergman, and Ceylan probably stretches it to its extreme by hardly ever leaving his actors' faces. And despite what anyone says about this movie, at the end of the day, it was only meant to highlight the inner workings of a family in the light of some frothing, volatile circumstances. At the end of the day, the son does what he thinks best for his mother; the father does what he thinks best to salvage the remnants of the wreck that his family had become in his absence. That's how every son and every father of every race or nationality is supposed to behave. Probably, it's the mother who refuses to fit into the "family" model, but then again, it is the odd element that actually initiates a story --- there's hardly ever a story if every person sticks to the script that life has destined him with. Moreover, Hacer, the horniest bitch of a mother that ever was, does not materialise from nowhere. The movie has all the elaborations for the sceptics, all the evidences for the Freudians. A good portion of the beginning half of the movie, where nothing whatsoever seems to be happening, does a brilliant job of what it had probably set out to do -- - to establish that nothing whatsoever happened to cheer up the mother's humdrum existence. This movie imitates life to that detailed extent --- life, which is usually a series of a few dynamite explosions, punctuated by a prolonged duration, where there's nothing but the fuse burning itself up. That brings me to what I believe is the greatest asset of the movie--- it's grim imitation of life. The hypocrisy, the evasion, the desire to let go yet the leash holding one back, the ordinariness, the extraordinariness, every possible human feeling that could cross a day- to-day existence has been etched deep and clear into this gem of a movie ---or, as I stated right in the beginning, into the actor's faces.And of course, there's the technical aspect of it. The train rumbling at just the right time, the cellphone ringing again just when it needed to (to say nothing of the ringtone, which was probably all the music that the movie had, the rest was just a brilliant choice of natural sounds), the camera focussing not just on the faces, but on the right areas of the faces (see how close it went), the use of monochrome for the most part without ever making it apparent --- these were just a random pick from the myriad of technical ploys that has stamped the word "masterpiece" on this visual and emotional extravaganza.