NURI BILGE CEYLAN
Turkey's gift to cinema visits Minneapolis this weekend to present a series of his internationally celebrated masterworks at Walker Art Center. A regular winner of Cannes Film Festival top prizes, his dramatic features display an artist's flair for composition (he was a renowned photographer), beside a novelist's grasp of human grief and pain. Thankfully, they sometimes see our follies as targets of satire rather than seriousness. Saturday he presents his 2014 Cannes Palme d'Or winner "Winter Sleep" (7 p.m.), a Chekhovian drama concerning a wealthy, reclusive Turkish hotel owner equally separated from his neighbors and family. The difficult romance "Climates" (1 p.m. Sun.) has Ceylan powerfully playing the lead, a relationship-challenged history professor with personal secrets to hide from others and himself. "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" (7 p.m. Wed.) concerns a team of police in the Turkish prairie searching for a missing body, with Ceylan's signature focus on dysfunctional humanity viewed through a crime story lens. The series ends with "Distant" (7 p.m. Nov. 12), about an Istanbul resident visited by his jobless rural cousin, and the estranged pair's ongoing attempts to endure one another's company. If you haven't encountered Ceylan's slow, quiet and morally complex work, this is a good place to start. (1750 Hennepin Av. S., Mpls. $9. www.walkerart.org.)
Colin Covert
