The hilarious highlight of John Boorman’s HOPE AND GLORY (1987), nominated for five Oscars: 9-year-old Bill Rohan rejoices in the destruction of his school by an errant Luftwaffe bomb. QUEEN & COUNTRY picks up the story nearly a decade later as Bill (Boorman’s alter-ego) begins basic training in the early Fifties, during the Korean War. Bill (played by a charming Callum Turner) is joined by a trouble-making army mate, Percy (Caleb Landry Jones). They never get near Korea, but engage in a constant battle of wits with the Catch-22-worthy Sgt. Major Bradley — the brilliant David Thewlis. Richard E. Grant is their superior, the veddy, veddy, infinitely put-upon, aptly-named Major Cross. A superb ensemble cast limns a wonderfully funny and often moving depiction of a still-recovering postwar England. (Karen Cooper, Director, Film Forum)

We are very pleased to open Mr. Boorman’s QUEEN & COUNTRY on February 27 at the Royal, Playhouse and Town Center. The film has garnered very positive reviews, including a New York Times Critic’s Pick from A.O. Scott, in which he wrote “Mr. Boorman approaches his story in the relaxed and generous manner of a raconteur, charming the audience rather than pushing us through the machinery of a plot…[the film] doesn’t quite have the bittersweet intensity of its precursor. The terrible magic of the war is missing, and so is the heightened, wide-eyed perceptiveness of the child protagonist. A young man is a more pedestrian creature, and the ’50s a quieter decade. Bill’s family, the focus of much of the drama in “Hope and Glory,” is glimpsed here in a few lovely scenes. The update is welcome. And so is the portrait, fleeting yet precisely detailed, of Britain at a time of change. The overt manifestation of that change is the arrival of the sovereign who gives QUEEN & COUNTRY its title, and who inspires cynicism and patriotism in its characters. But as the young Elizabeth II takes the throne, you can feel the ground shifting, and a different Britain coming into view: the one that would give the world angry young playwrights, rock ’n’ roll bands and resourceful, iconoclastic filmmakers like John Boorman.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qG1TvckA-Q&feature=youtu.be

Internationally acclaimed Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has won prizes at major film festivals all over the world, but it wasn’t until last May, after being nominated four times, that he finally took home what is probably the topmost prize of all, the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or. It was for WINTER SLEEP, a “richly engrossing and ravishingly beautiful magnum opus” about Aydin, a former actor who runs a small hotel in central Anatolia with his young wife Nihal and his sister Necla, who is recovering from her recent divorce. “A Chekhovian meditation on a marriage that returns to the mood of the director’s early films like Climates and Clouds of May,” this “patient, beautiful, painful, engrossing film pits husband and wife against each other and their world in a series of extended conversations/confrontations.”

Indiewire’s Eric Kohn recently interviewed Mr. Ceylan and posted this piece:

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan makes deeply atmospheric movies filled with long pauses and delicate visual schemes, so it’s no surprise that he tends to hold back when talking about his work. That includes “Winter Sleep,” which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes last May and opens in New York this weekend. Asked in a recent e-mail interview if landing the biggest prize in the global film scene felt like a different sort of validation after gathering acclaim for his work for nearly 20 years, Ceylan kept it simple: “I don’t know.”

He used that phrase a lot. Like his films, Ceylan is a mystery who requires a certain amount of scrutiny to appreciate.

The story of “Winter Sleep,” which runs over three hours, finds the director dealing with the travails of greedy landowner Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), who owns a vast plot of land and lords over its impoverished inhabitants while bickering with his younger wife (Melisa Soezen). Over the course of the movie, the Scrooge-like man confronts his shortcomings, both personally and professionally, through a series of extensive monologues punctuated by telling pauses.

That’s typical for Ceylan, whose other acclaimed dramas — which include the slow-burn chronicle of a police investigation, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,” and the devastating tale of a crumbling relationship “Climates” — tend to quietly develop narrative through behavior and stunning imagery that harkens back to his roots as a photographer. “Winter Sleep” finds Ayden often gazing out his window at a barren land, an image that has near-biblical ramifications, even as the character’s specific situation has more to do with internal struggles. The approach has its rewards for viewers willing to let the experiential nature of Ceylan’s storytelling wash over them. But that’s obviously a limited crop: Released in the U.S. late in the year by Adopt Films, the movie is a major hidden gem on this year’s release calendar.

Read the rest of the Indiewire piece by clicking here.