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  • The Brutalist is slow as hell, nothing really happens you would care about, it goes on for fucking ever and then it skips ahead 30 odd years and ends. 100% not recommended.

  • I enjoy these types of movies. The most recent one I watched was Terry Gilliams Days of Heaven. I saw it described as a visual poem (This is accurate) about a boy running from his past with his girlfriend and sister, arrives to work as a farmhand on a Texas farm during harvest season.

    I enjoy Tarkovskys films, those are generally quite slow but philosophically dense. Stalker, Solaris, and Andrei Rublev. I haven't seen the rest.

    I also enjoy abstract documentaries. Baraka is a dialogue-less epic showcasing the alienness of human culture. Amazing visuals and music. Life changing for me. In this genre, I also love Chris Marker's Sans Soleil -- a directors reflections on memory and time. A more serious, focused documentary following several men responsible for the mass execution of communists in Indonesia in the 60s as they act out their atrocities for what they believe will be a great action movie, called The Act of Killing directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, is also powerful and surreal. These three films had a drastic effect on me personally are the greatest documentaries I've seen, though not much happens in them.

    More recent slow movies I've enjoyed: Past Lives, about childhood love. Scored by Daniel Rossen of the indie band Grizzly Bear, it is a beautiful and different outlook on love. Very touching. Not much happens.

    The other is The Brutalist, an epic about a Jewish architect escaping the Holocaust and moving to America, seeking the American dream. Haunting, looming.

    Edit: Richard Linklaters films generally have very loose plots. I've only seen School of Rock and Boyhood though. Love Boyhood.

  • Valhalla Rising and Beyond the Black Rainbow are both low on exposition and focus a lot on building an ambiance around the wilderness or a false sense of nostalgia

    edit: Unbreakable has some great cinematography and framing with really long holds between cuts by today's standards, slows the visual pacing but makes it feel way more epic and suspenseful

  • Yellow Submarine (1968)

    The plot is a very thin, dreamy excuse for a bunch of interconnected psychedelic cartoon music videos full of pretty colors and mostly slow-moving goofball artwork. If you absolutely hate the Beatles' music it's probably not for you, but if your feelings about them are anywhere on the scale from "neutral" to "okay" or above you might like it. I personally don't really have strong feelings about the Beatles' music for the most part, but this is still somehow one of my favorite movies to zone out with.

    Night of the Living Dead (1968)

    A great zombie flick, the one that started the whole thing, but also really slow and relatively simple in plot by today's standards. Beautiful to watch if you have the taste for horror, and still works if you're not into the ultraviolent bloody gory end of the genre.

    Silent Running (1972)

    Ambitious, pretty, and very melancholy scifi with ecological overtones. Most people still thought of scifi film as strictly kids' stuff at this time, this movie was one of the earlier attempts to challenge that.

    The Room (2003)

    It's legendarily bad, but also really fits the slow-paced and minimal plot requirement. If you're the type to have fun with shitty movies, check it out.

    The Showa era Godzilla films (1954-1975)

    Godzilla's Showa era encompasses basically the original run, and while the plots varied from meager to surprisingly good the monster fights quickly became what it was all about. That era was all a lot more slowly-paced and less frenetic than any more modern takes on the character or the kaiju genre. If you want to chill and zone out pick a random one and let it run in its entirety, or for a quicker fix you can always do what I did as a kid (and sometimes still do) and just skip any scene with only humans and enjoy the monster fights.

51 comments