Sinav

I had seen scenes from this movie from the clip of Nil Karaibrahimgil's song, I was curious. There was also veteran action actor JCVD. As a movie, it's an average movie, but what it wanted to tell was good.

This is good, light-hearted quasi-thriller (?) that succeeds without really trying to, or may be succeeds because it does not try too hard. Director Sorak seems to get the right lessons from the mistakes in G.O.R.A., or may be he fares better since 'Sinav' (The Exam) is his own project. Editing is better, seamless and fascinating. Turkish directors in general, Sorak included, are getting better and better at controlling the tempo lately.

The movie is about a small circle of friends, all high-school students under the stress of the approaching annual nationwide university entrance exam. They decide to ease their way by stealing the questions of the exam at all costs, even if they had pay thousands of bucks to hire a double-o-seven type.

The mixture of experienced and young actors do a good job with believable performances, they look and act real, even when things seem to go absurd for a while. It even has Jean-Claude Van Damme in a small but important cameo role to garnish. Any high kicks? well, one... kinda.

Turkish cinema produces about 25-30 movies a year - This one is one of the several that are actually worth watching.

A very good movie which contains a lot of life lessons and important messages. It was directed also in unusual way which i liked. Highly recommended. Cast was good, it describes the status quo of the system. Even though this movie is 19 years old, we still can observe similar trends and structure in current framework. Educational system unfortunately still serves to interests of few people and testing students create huge amounts of stress and chaos in their lives. Life is tough, not easy. This movie depicts all these messages and acting was also on spot. I wish this movie to be shown on TVs but I suppose certain stakeholders on top do not like smart movies to be shown on televisions.

We have watched Sinav with young people in Khalkedon. Sinav gives a priority to young people's problems. One of the most important problems is education and Grand University Exam. The question asked in the film that is possible to measure the performance with one exam? As a main basis horse race was given in the movie.

Ruya Onal is excellent; we can see her movies in soon. Jean-Claude Van Damme was not suit in his role. If he would played, we should have seen much more action scenes. Other players were average. Some characters, some typical pronunciation sticks to the player. We see Kadir Copdemir with same sort of character.

The director tried to bring velocity to the movie by accelerating scenes. However for the velocity we need much more peculiarities.

The movie is not bad on the whole; at least it gives us valuable clues about life itself.

Good directed movie, you can enjoy every moment. Above Turkish standards of its time, good story, good cinematography, acting is well enough. I am guessing non watchers have voted for the movie.