The incredibly disappointing Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Unfortunately I was incredibly disappointed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 2011 film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia - in that his more recent Winter Sleep was clearly among the best films I've seen this year. Once Upon has a few of the same qualities - a deliberate pace, a serious theme, a cast of thoughtful and introspective characters - and in some ways an even more promising premise: a team of law-enforcement officials (a police chief, medical examiner, public prosecutor, and their legion) take two suspects on a night-time odyssey across a stretch of rural Turkey in search of the field where the men buried the body of a comrade whom they're accused of murdering. The problem: there is virtually no dramatic tension throughout the film, it moves not at a deliberative pace but at a glacial pace (Ceylan is one of the few writer-directors who approaches presenting action, or I should say scenes, in real time - letting characters debate and discuss a point for, say, 20 minutes, as people do in life - not the truncated, highly pointed semiotics of screenplays and movies: he makes us see how even the most "realistic" movie is actually not realistic at all - it's selective, edited, highlighted, and "treated," like a synthetic fabric). Real time practically kills this movie as the search for the grave site is just a series of episodes w/out increasing stakes and the follow-up, particularly conversations between the prosecutor and the medical examiner, the two most highly educated people in the film, are cool and abstract (not dramatic and revealing, as are the conversations in Winter Sleep). Worse, we know little or nothing about the crime itself that sets this story in motion - a curious decision on Ceylan's part. The men accused therefore are complete enigmas to us, which further alienates us from this strange film of missed opportunities. Plus, it's very long - pushing three hours; plus, I have to note that there is not a single female speaking part in the entire movie (again, Winter Sleep is very different, with strong female characters central to the movie).