The late Yilmaz Guney was something more than the Stanley Kramer of Turkey and something less than its Jean-Luc Godard. Which is to say that while his films show a fairly advanced ideological awareness (particularly of the ways in which political relations are reproduced in private life), he’s content to work within traditional melodramatic forms. Yol, which the imprisoned Guney directed through an assistant, Serif Goren, never reconciles its dramatic format with its propagandistic ends: each time a sequence approaches cinematic life, it’s flattened by the appearance of a thesis. And there’s simply not enough background information provided to enable American audiences to respond on any level other than the emotional—a level on which we’re bound to be disappointed. With Tarik Akan and Halil Ergun.