Uzak is an absolute example of auteur cinema – Ceylan shot and co-edited it himself – and in theory at least, is a partial autobiography, a portrait of the artist as a disenchanted waster. One of the two main characters, Mahmut (Muzaffer ?demir), is a commercial photographer, Ceylan’s own former profession. The other is Mahmut’s country cousin Yusuf (played by Ceylan’s cousin Mehmet Emin Toprak), who comes to stay with him while looking for work on a ship.Mahmut is none too happy to play host, since he has his own sorrows to contend with. His ex-wife is about to move to Canada; he’s having an affair with a woman who pays silent, unhappy visits to him at dead of night; and his ill mother is leaving phone messages which he doggedly ignores. More than most film-makers, Ceylan uses what’s to hand in his life – Uzak is partly shot in his own Istanbul flat, and co-stars his cousin – although he uses it so subtly that we can never be sure how close any of it is to his personal reality.

In a month which has given us the restoration of Troy’s ramparts and the razing of LA by multiple tornados, the truly awe-inspiring apparition on our screens is this: a huge, rusting hulk of a ship keeled on its side in a frozen Istanbul dock. This extravagantly strange apparition, looming into view in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak, wasn’t achieved, like the others, by armies of boffins slaving at digital workstations on a multi-million-dollar budget No. The ship simply happened to be there, a sight so authentically surreal that apparently just about every director working in Istanbul that winter contrived to get it into their film.
Uzak (Turkish for “distant”) is what you might call poetic realism: the sort of film that reminds us to look at what’s there, whether it’s as majestic as that ship, or as insignificant or even abject as an old set of wind chimes, the daily outpourings of cable TV, or a scrawny mouse trapped on sticky paper. Bring on the killer hailstones! n.barber independent.co.uk. But he has to fill the gaps between the cataclysmic set pieces somehow, and he tries to do so without the aid of a plot: at no point does Jeff Goldblum pop up and twitch his way through a plan to save the planet.Of the film’s two heroes, all Jake Gyllenhaal has to do is stay indoors, wrap up warm, and pluck up the courage to ask out his lovely classmate; all Quaid has to do is ponder the importance of spending quality time with his family, and then hike through the snow for absolutely no reason other than to facilitate a cool, Planet of the Apes-apeing shot of the Statue of Liberty with frostbite. It’s the latest film from Roland Emmerich, the man who pulverised the White House in Independence Day and the Chrysler Building in Godzilla, and now he’s hammering most of Los Angeles and New York. The authorities have ignored the warnings of top climatologist Dennis Quaid, and their environmentally unfriendly ways have resulted in an extremely unfriendly environment: cue typhoons, tidal waves, and brass-monkey temperature drops.Emmerich delivers several outstanding sequences – among them a frightening ice storm in Tokyo and the unnerving progress of an ocean liner through the flooded streets of Manhattan.

But if there’s a fuller version to come on DVD it could be a masterpiece.When the DVD of The Day After Tomorrow (12A) comes out, you might want to fast-forward through any parts that don’t involve mass destruction. The editors have cut so much vital information that the central mystery is still a mystery at the end It makes for a flawed, frustrating film. Having delineated the world of JK Rowling’s novels so efficiently in the first two films, Chris Columbus passes the wand to Alfonso Cuar?and the maker of Y tu mam?ambi?introduces the one ingredient that the other films were short of: the magic. The early scenes in Privet Drive and Diagon Alley are bejewelled with spooky sight gags worthy of The Addams Family, and Hogwarts has more creaks and shadows than it used to, but Cuar? best trick is to conjure magic not just from the supernatural, but from the natural. Much of the movie’s enchantment derives from shots, filmed in Glen Coe, of lakes and mountains and sunlight on bracken.Unfortunately, Cuar?oncentrates so intently on HPATPOA’s atmosphere that he literally loses the plot, and so the one great moment when everything clicks into place and you realise that there wasn’t a scene or a character that wasn’t essential to Rowling’s story – that moment doesn’t arrive.