This may seem an odd form of praise, but Nuri Bilge Ceylan does boredom awfully well. The Turkish director's last film, "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" (2011), was a police procedural that had been denuded of the drama you'd normally expect from the genre. Yet as its protagonists trudged fruitlessly from one place to the next in search of a buried corpse, their idle, time-passing chatter began to reveal telling details. For Ceylan, the most interesting moments are often the ones where, superficially, nothing much happens.
His latest and longest, "Winter Sleep" (originally released as "Kis Uykusu") is set among the dwellings of Turkey's mountainous Cappadocia region. But forget the scenery: most of the action takes place behind closed doors, in long, meandering exchanges between characters who are just trying to kill time, but might end up killing each other.
Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), a wealthy landowner, has retired from his acting career in Istanbul to run a boutique hotel, where he lives alongside his young wife and recently divorced sister (Melisa Sozen and Demet Akbag, who are both excellent). He chats with guests, frets about his flaky tenants and pens weekly think pieces for a local newspaper, while constantly delaying work on his planned masterpiece, a "serious, thick book" on the history of Turkish theater.