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Social media movie discourse is at it again. This time around, I’m being horrified by posts from younger moviegoers who freely admit to fast-forwarding through movies to skip past “the boring parts” (like, you know, the dialogue scenes), or even to watching them at double speed. Let’s talk about attention spans…and how we ain’t got ‘em anymore.
I’m not saying I blame these folks. Modern tech takes advantage of our brains’ addictive tendencies by training us to use our phones like we’re on a ravenous hunt for serotonin. Meanwhile, blockbusters have gotten longer, but also faster and louder—there’s a big difference between three hours of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and three hours of Avengers: Endgame. When we’re asked to listen too long a bit of dialogue, or gaze at a vista that doesn’t seem to be directly advancing the plot, we’re pulling out our phones. (I’m also guilty of this when watching at home, which is part of the reason I love seeing movies in the theater, where I am duty-bound to actually pay attention.)
But there’s an art to the boring movie, and some of them wouldn’t be half as compelling if they actually tried to thrill us with every frame. Here are great movies that invite you to be bored by injecting a bit of silence or lingering on a long conversation. They’ll move you deeply, challenge your preconceptions, or maybe put you right to sleep. Any would be a win, really.
Skinamarink (2022)
Run time: 100 minutes
Writer/director Kyle Edward Ball’s film began life as a YouTube channel devoted to recreations of the childhood nightmares submitted by users. What plot there is in this feature length take on that idea involves a four-year-old named Kevin who injures himself while home alone with his six-year-old sister, Kaylee. What follows makes little narrative sense, and it’s certainly easy to understand why the micro-budget film was polarizing for audiences. Where the film succeeds, and brilliantly, is in recreating the sense of a child’s twilight world, one in which even a familiar home can feel bizarre, unsettling, and terrifying under the right circumstances. Ball takes his time creating that mood—and it’s nearly all mood. I’m not sure what he’s trying to do has ever been done better.
Where to stream: Shudder, Hulu, digital rental
Inland Empire (2006)
Run time: 180 minutes
I’ve seen just about everything that David Lynch has ever produced, and I still have no idea how to talk about Inland Empire. If you don’t count Twin Peaks: The Return (the 18 hours of which Lynch wants you to consider a film, this is the most recent of the director’s features, though it was released way back in 2006 (the first film to be shot entirely on digital video, it’s recently been remastered). There are sex workers and anthropomorphic rabbits in a story about a woman who gives her all to get a part in a Hollywood movie, only to descend into a nearly three-hour fever dream. It’s either a moving and surreal dive into some kind of cinematic collective unconscious, or an impenetrable collection of non sequiturs. No one musters emotions of unease and dread like Lynch, even if we, as viewers, aren’t even sure what we’re so anxious about.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, digital rental
Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)
Run time: 81 minutes
At a mere 81 minutes, it’s hard to get too bored by David Gelb’s documentary, but the stakes here are more personal than world-altering. Set to a score by Philip Glass, the film follows the title’s Jiro Ono, the then-85-year-old sushi master who’s regarded as one of the world’s greatest living sushi chefs. He makes sushi that looks (and, presumably, tastes) incredible, crafting the same sushi day after day alongside his sons, while continuing to refine his skills into his 80s and beyond. That’s pretty much it. Just a gentle exploration of the idea that the key to happiness might be getting really good at something, but also never being completely content with your talents.
Where to stream: Hulu, Peacock, Tubi, Crackle, digital rental
Lost in Translation (2003)
Run time: 102 minutes
Bob (Bill Murray) takes a business trip to Tokyo smack dab in the middle of a major midlife crisis. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is a young Yale grad tagging along on a trip to the city with her celebrity photographer husband. The two outsiders spend time together, experiencing the city with a kind of not-quite-romantic melancholy. Plot-wise, that’s pretty much it, but it still winds up being deeply moving.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Run time: 132 minutes (theatrical cut)
There’s a scene in the first Star Trek movie that’s controversial not for its political or philosophical content, but for its length: a nearly five-minute shuttle flyby of the newly re-designed USS Enterprise, accompanied by a rousing bit of Jerry Goldsmith scoring. It’s either a nearly erotic bit of spaceship porn, or one of the dullest sequences ever put to film, depending on your perspective (I’m very much team spaceship porn). The rest of director Robert Wise’s movie, rushed into theaters before it was quite finished, is similarly stately paced. There’s no fighting, little action, and plenty of self-serious pontificating. In some ways, it feels like it’s trying too hard to be 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it has a strange power of its own.
Where to stream: Max, Paramount+, digital rental
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Run time: 81 minutes
So much of the ur-found footage film’s runtime involves slightly (but realistically) annoying people wandering around lost in the Maryland woods while disturbing, but rarely thrilling, events put them on edge and turn them against each other. Little actually happens before the memorable closing minutes, but it all serves to effectively build up an unbearable sense of tension. This is definitely one where the sum adds up to more than the (often boring) parts.
Where to stream: digital rental
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Run time: 127 minutes
When we think of spy dramas, we tend to think of Bond (James Bond), Bourne, or Atomic Blonde…but Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is something else entirely, a quietly paranoid film set in a grubby, dingy 1970s. Gary Oldman plays John Le Carre’s George Smiley, here brought out of retirement to help uncover a mole within the highest ranks of British intelligence. There’s barely any action, and nary even a raised voice. Instead, Tinker Tailor makes the case that spy craft is about information: who has it, who controls it, and who knows how to get it.
Where to stream: Starz, digital rental
Russian Ark (2002)
Run time: 96 minutes
As boring Russian movies go, Russian Ark is especially challenging, but also, ultimately, really lovely and rewarding. It’s also a supreme technical feat, unfolding in a single, uninterrupted take. Filmed in the the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, the story, such as it is, involves an unnamed narrator who wanders the halls of the building, encountering real and fictional people from the city’s 300-year history. The discussions are largely philosophical, but the scope increases as the movie progresses. By the end, we’ve encountered 2,000 people and multiple orchestras, all seamlessly maneuvered through time and space.
Where to stream: Hoopla, Kanopy, Plex
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Run time: 159 minutes
Few Stanley Kubrick movies couldn’t appear here; the director loves his deliberate pacing. Eyes Wide Shut is a particularly interesting case, though, since a movie about Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and a kinky sex cult doesn’t sound like something in danger of putting people to sleep. And yet, people were initially put off by the movie’s chilly formalism and distant, dreamlike feel. Kubrick’s swan song was a bit of a bait-and-switch, promising a peek under the covers of one of Hollywood’s then-hottest couples, and instead offering a slow-paced cautionary tale about the dangers of sexual obsession.
Where to stream: digital rental
Ikiru (1952)
Run time: 143 minutes
Japanese director Akira Kurosawa is best known for epics such as The Seven Samurai and Rashomon, but even in those relatively action-packed films, an ambivalence toward lives filled with violence breaks through. His filmography is also filled with quieter, more contemplative works, with 1952’s Ikiru (meaning, roughly, “To Live”) among the best. Kanji Watanabe (Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura) plays a veteran bureaucrat who has worked in the same monotonous job for decades. At the same time he discovers that he’s dying of stomach cancer, a group of parents arrives in search of permits to clear a cesspool and build a playground for the local children. Watanabe commits himself to going against everything he’s learned about playing by the rules in order to help the parents cut through the red tape that would likely put an end to their dream. It’s both a universal and a uniquely Japanese story about heroic deeds, even if they mostly involve shuffling paperwork.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, digital rental
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Run time: 3 hours and 10 minutes
What do you mean you’re not into watching a three-plus hour courtroom scene? Director Stanley Kramer followed up Inherit the Wind with this legal drama depicting a fictionalized version of one of the twelve Nuremberg Military Tribunals that determined the horrifying extent of Nazi war crimes following World War II. Spencer Tracy leads one of the most star-stacked casts ever(?), including Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, William Shatner, and Montgomery Clift, among others.
Where to stream: Tubi, MGM+, digital rental
Beau Travail (1999)
Run time: 90 minutes
Galoup (Denis Lavant) reflects on his experiences in Djibouti, leading a section of men as part of the French Foreign Legion in writer/director Claire Denis’s sun-baked queer classic. Everything is going great for Gallup until the arrival of Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin), who inadvertently threatens Galoup’s relationship with his commander, and inspires Galoup to a nearly irrational jealousy. There’s the potential for violent drama, but the film favors the languid and elliptical (also the very sweaty), building tension through stunning scenery and brilliant camerawork. Beau Travail makes frequent appearances on Best-Movies-of-All-Time lists, and deservedly so.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, digital rental
The Straight Story (1999)
Run time: 112 minutes
This one is a David Lynch movie so uncharacteristic of the director that it hardly feels like his movie; watch this Disney release back-to-back with Inland Empire and feel your brain melt. The great Richard Farnsworth, joined by Sissy Spacek, plays the real-life Alvin Straight, who crossed the country to visit his ailing brother on a riding lawnmower, going around five miles per hour, which is also about how fast the narrative moves. Lynch’s sensibilities somehow bring a feeling of newness to the slow-moving story set in a rural landscape.
Where to stream: Disney+, The Criterion Channel, digital rental
Weekend (2011)
Run time: 97 minutes
Andrew Haigh’s slice-of-gay-life romantic drama stars starring Tom Cullen and Chris New as a couple of guys who hook-up at club and spend the titular weekend together. They talk about their interests and pasts, eat, go for walks, and engage in some frank (especially for the time) fucking—honestly, it’s still rare to find a mainstream-ish movie with even a basic understanding of the mechanics of cis gay male sex. Anyway! A planned move on Monday ups the stakes by putting a time limit on their relationship, but otherwise the dramatic beats are all emotional, with the movie providing a charming, poignant, and generally real-feeling look at modern relationships.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel, AMC+, digital rental
Before Sunrise (1995)
Run time: 101 minutes
Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke wander around Vienna, having casual conversations and offering up monologues relating to their views on life, art, and love. Director Richard Linklater’s minimalist, flawlessly cast movie is simultaneously soaringly romantic and completely down to earth, its no-plot premise feeling as daring and risk-taking as anything in cinema. If you like it, two more similarly slow-paced installments follow.
Where to stream: digital rental
Paterson (2016)
Run time: 118 minutes
Jim Jarmusch directs Adam Driver as the title character, a bus driver and poet who follows pretty much the same routine each and every day (which is deeply relatable, even if it’s a lot more common in real life than onscreen). Paterson drives his bus, walks his wife’s dog, and stops at a bar for a beer in the afternoon, each day writing some poetry in his notebook. As a movie, it’s deliberately non-dramatic, even as it turns on the kind of small event that can cause major upheaval in your life.
Where to stream: Prime Video
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Run time: 201 minutes
Even the name of Chantal Ackerman’s masterpiece is long, with the finished film clocking in at over three hours and taking place over just three days, with a camera that, by design, hardly seems to move. And yet! The film captures the highly disciplined schedule of a widowed mother who goes through the same routine each day, one that includes fairly joyless sex work involving a single customer before her son gets home from school. It’s all quietly captivating. When the drudgery of Jeanne’s day-to-day live begins to unravel, very slowly, the resulting breakdown is as fascinating, hypnotic, and as subtly horrifying as everything that came before.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, digital rental
It Follows (2014)
Run time: 100 minutes
While its pacing might not be nearly as languid as others listed here, the premise of It Follows makes clear that we’re on an entirely different spectrum from other chase-based horror movies; even the slowest of slow zombies could outpace the threats in writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s breakout film. The plot involves something that could be described as a sexually transmitted curse, in which a victim is pursued by an entity that can look like anyone. It doesn’t chase you, nor is it even overtly threatening, but it will pursue you to the ends of the Earth, if need be, while taking its sweet-ass time. It’s probably the movie most responsible for the “elevated horror” discourse; some would argue the entire sub-genre is boring as hell.
Where to stream: Netflix, Hulu, digital rental
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
Run time: 121 minutes
Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, who’d go on to get a pile of Oscar nominations for The Favourite the year after this one came out, is clearly never in a hurry, with each of his movies employing pacing best described as leisurely. In The Favourite, that style serves to heighten the satire; here, it helps to build a deeply unsettling atmosphere. Inspired by Greek tragedy (Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, specifically), the film introduces a seemingly perfect family (led by Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman) who come into contact with a mysterious teenager (Barry Keoghan) who gradually insinuates himself into their lives. We know he’s up to something, and eventually, they do too—but it’s not until the final act that we fully grasp his motives, and his relentlessly planned revenge.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Run time: 96 minutes
There’s plenty of incident in Ingmar Bergman’s historical fantasy, but there’s also an awful lot of quiet. Many of the director’s films build waves of deep emotion that start as bubbles just under the surface, cresting only sporadically, but powerfully. Here, instead, we have the Black Plague-era story of people at various stages of acceptance amid the sure knowledge that God, if He’s not dead, is at least entirely silent and disinterested in them. Max von Sydow plays cynical knight Antonius Block, who memorably plays chess with Death even as he encounters a parade of peasants in his travels whose only hope for happiness lies in defying entropy and embracing life.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, digital rental
A Ghost Story (2017)
Run time: 92 minutes
Director David Lowery has a pretty stellar track record, at least outside a couple of perfectly fine Disney movies, and A Ghost Story is probably among the best contemplations of death ever put to film. A man dies unexpectedly, but instead of moving on, he haunts the wife he left behind, while wearing a traditional ghost sheet. That’s pretty much it as far as plot goes, but there’s poignant beauty in the man’s slow walk through the afterlife, and his growing realization that change is painful, but often hurts less than holding on. Never before or since have I wept at a scene in which a grief-stricken woman eats an entire pie.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
Drive My Car (2021)
Run time: 179 minutes
The story on which the movie is based, from Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore, IQ84) only runs to around 45 pages, and yet this film adaptation stretches to three hours. It’s the story of a widowed theater director who forges a bond with the young woman assigned to drive him to Hiroshima for his latest project. It offers little in the way of incident, and relatively minimal dialogue, though the cinematography the sound design make those silent stretches captivating. Ultimately, it’s a story about the transcendent beauty of human connection, even through all of the pain that keeps us apart. It’s also a film about how, sometimes, it’s OK to chat with your Lyft driver.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel, digital rental
Barry Lyndon (1975)
Run time: 185 minutes
Kubrick, who never really hit the same genre twice, had a go at historical drama with astounding effect—even if it’s probably the least watched film of his peak era. It’s not hard to understand why, given the long running time and lack of sci-fi/horror trappings in the styles of a 2001 or a Shining, but it’s very much a Kubrick film, with all that entails. Emotions run deep but distant, and it’s a technical triumph, full of exquisite period detail. Though the pace is undeniably slow, sometimes to the point of languid, the story of a ruthless social climber (Ryan O’Neal) is also probably the director’s funniest (in a very dry way), and also his most deeply cynical. If his other films are reaching to find the goodness in humanity, this one makes the argues that some people are just shits.
Where to stream: digital rental
The Thin Red Line (1998)
Run time: 185 minutes
It’s been said it’s nearly impossible to make a true anti-war film, given that movies are so often in the business of enthralling and thrilling us, and how do you have a war movie without action? Writer/director Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line isn’t an anti-war film, precisely, but it’s far more focused on the philosophy of war and its effects on the lives and minds of the soldiers that fight in it. Instead of battle sequences, we’re most often watching the faces of the grunts witnessing them. The result might not be the greatest war film ever, but it is something unique in the history of that genre.
Where to stream: Starz, digital rental
Valhalla Rising (2009)
Run time: 92 minutes
As with Malick’s unconventional take on the war film, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn does something wholly unexpected with the many Viking-adjacent movies and TV shows of the past decade. The mute One-Eye (Mads Mikkelsen) is a fighter, but only because he’s been made to be one. In thrall to a Norwegian chieftain in the Scottish highlands, his escape sees him befriended by a slightly more talkative boy as they set out toward the coast, beset by terrifying visions (mostly) and real threats (occasionally). The film is far more concerned with mood than violence, of which there’s only a bit; in the long interludes of walking and mysterious dreams lie the story’s heart.
Where to stream: Netflix, AMC+, Shudder, digital purchase
Paris, Texas (1984)
Run time: 147 minutes
Travis Henderson (the late, great Harry Dean Stanton) wanders out of the desert, bewildered, and seemingly with no knowledge of who he is. A doctor manages to find his brother Walt (the also late, also great Dean Stockwell), and Travis begins a journey back to himself, and his family, and the choices that defined his life up until that point. Wim Wenders is a brilliant director of desolation, and presents the modern American west as an alien landscape equally strange, mysterious, and healing. And you get to see a lot of that landscape over the film’s nearly three-hour runtime.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, digital rental
Solaris (1972)
Run time: 166 minutes
Solaris is ostensibly a sci-fi thriller about first contact with an unknowable alien entity. It also includes a 5-minute uninterrupted scene of a car driving through a tunnel. (Nothing exciting happens in the tunnel.) Based on the Stanislaw Lem novel, this 1972 Soviet film from boring film artiste par excellence Andrei Tarkovsky takes you to another world that also doesn’t seem to have much going on, as astronaut psychologist Kris Kelvin is sent to the remote Solaris space station to figure out whether it’s worth continuing the mission to study the planet below, which appears to be nothing more than one vast ocean. But there’s something going on beneath those waves, and a beneath the endless, drawn out shots of the churning waves and the empty corridors of the station; both the movie and the alien world seek to lull you into a false sense of security. Tarkovsky’s goal was to move past what he saw as the cold materialism of Western science fiction into something more emotionally resonant, and damn if he didn’t succeed (while also being a little dull).
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, digital rental
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Run time: 139 minutes
One more from Mr. Kubrick, clearly a master of very deliberate pacing. 2001 is thrilling in its scope (from the dawn of humanity, to a future enhanced and endangered by artificial intelligence, to our ultimate(?) evolution—it’s easy to forget how many graceful, elegant asides there are on the journey. A shuttle docks to a space station to the Blue Danube Waltz, and that’s just the first of many sequences with minimal dialogue and maximum classical music scoring. Even the film’s kaleidoscopic and consequential finale eschews traditional thrills in favor of something more cerebral. Ponderous to some, there’s a reason that the movie’s messages and meanings have been debated for decades.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
Stalker (1979)
Run time: 161 minutes
When the Soviet State Committee for Cinematography criticized the pace of Stalker upon its initial release, Andrei Tarkovsky allegedly retorted: “The film needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.” Though the “main action” here is also fairly subdued, if we’re being entirely honest. In a nebulous near-future, an event of some kind has created an area known only as “The Zone,” a region in which the normal rules of physics don’t apply, and that’s equally full of wonders and terrors, even if the aesthetic is mostly dusty post-apocalypse. It’s off-limits, but there’s a market for Stalkers—individuals who know their way around enough to help others find what they’re looking for. In this case, our Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) is tasked by characters known only as “The Writer” and “The Professor” to help them find a room that can grant your deepest desire. It’s easy to get lost in Tarkovsky’s world if we’re willing to give ourselves over to it, and the philosophical ideas at play—including the question as to whether getting your heart’s desire would be anything other than a disaster—are genuinely compelling.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, digital rental
La Notte (1961)
Run time: 122 minutes
Like all of Michelangelo Antonioni’s significant films, La Notte ditches the plot in favor of telling its story through atmosphere. In modern terms? It’s all vibes. Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau play a married couple—an embittered novelist and his increasingly detached wife—who carry on a day’s worth of social engagements despite their growing understanding that the marriage isn’t working. Antonioni can find beauty in the most prosaic settings, and his ennui is more interesting than the action of many others’ movies.
Where to stream: Max, Criterion Channel, digital rental
