Wesley Morris: 9. “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”

The Romanians took the year off from making great movies about life’s grueling forensics. Instead, a movie you could imagine them making came to us from Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a Turk whose mastery of atmosphere, irony, and the ebb of time are almost without peer. His fifth film is his longest, least characteristic, and most hypnotically framed. It’s a police procedural that spans a few days and nights in the Turkish hinterlands. The criminals are nincompoops, the crime grisly but elusive, and the director in sly novelistic form, fashioning grunt work with a richly comic sense of the blasé.