Turkish maestro Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s most ambitious film to date imbues its ostensibly straightforward police procedural story with emotional resonance and philosophical curiosity. With two confessed killers in tow, a volatile provincial police officer joins a sceptical doctor and a slightly smug Ankara prosecutor on a cross-country trek to unearth the body of a murder victim. Ceylan the visual stylist delivers spectacularly moody nocturnal landscapes, but as the story unfolds at an admittedly meditative gait, it’s his ability to find a register at once naturalistic and poetic which continues to compel. There’s comment aplenty here on Turkey’s slow modernisation and its cultural marginalisation of women, yet the key strand explores the impact of this confounding murder case on lawyer and doctor alike, since the truth seems to escape their grasp somewhere between known facts and the narratives we conjure up to make sense of the world. This mature, involving and endlessly fascinating drama was a deserved winner of last year’s Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix.  (Notes by Trevor Johnston).