#1
The Turin Horse
Telling me this movie is two and a half hours of peeling hot potatoes in black and white. My finger hovered over the 2x button before the horse even cleared the first windstorm. Nothing happens. The wind howls forever. The dad sits there glaring. I farmed three entire Roblox obbies waiting for someone to drop a piece of dialogue. When the stove finally went out, I felt genuine relief. Absolute pain on normal speed.
#2
Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Eighty minutes felt like eighty hours in an empty movie theater during a flood. A guy eats melon in absolute silence for ten years. Footsteps echo down gross dark hallways forever. People just wander around avoiding eye contact while water drips into buckets. I glanced up from Subway Surfers four times and nobody moved a muscle. You could run this at quadruple speed and still catch every plot beat. My screen timeout almost triggered twice.
#3
An Elephant Sitting Still
Four entire hours of grey depressing Chinese apartments and kids glaring at the dirt. Nobody runs. Nobody smiles. Everyone talks in whispered monotone while walking down endless alleys. I kept tapping my screen to check the progress bar, and it barely budged. My phone battery died while the characters were still brooding about a train station. It actually sucked me in during the final thirty minutes, but getting there felt like serving a real prison sentence.
#4
Memoria
Tilda Swinton wanders around Bogota jumping every time a loud thud plays in her head. That is the whole gimmick. She stares at audio monitors. She sits in a park while a guy naps so hard he looks dead. Then she listens to grass grow. I was trying to play Brawl Stars, but the random audio boom kept throwing off my aim. Hit fast-forward and save your ears the sixty-minute wait between sound effects.
2 critics · 2 lists →
Watch in AU
Stan
Stan
#5
Taste of Cherry
A guy drives around dusty hills asking strangers to bury him. That sounds intense, right? Wrong. He drives at five miles an hour. The camera just glares out the passenger window at endless dirt roads. I waited forty minutes for him to speed up or pick a side. Every conversation takes twenty business days to finish. I skipped three gear shifts and missed zero context. The ending cut straight to camcorder footage and mocked my patience completely.
2 critics · 2 lists →
#6
Cemetery of Splendor
Sleeping soldiers hooked up to glowing light tubes in a clinic. Sounds like cool sci-fi, but it plays like an unskippable loading screen. People take naps. Then they go look at statues. Then an old lady talks to ghosts about palaces while staring at empty dirt. The glowing neon tubes looked neat while I was grinding my daily quests. Other than the pretty colors, this runtime tested every ounce of my willpower to avoid tapping ahead.
#7
First Cow
Two guys steal milk in the woods to bake oily cakes. I thought this was going to be an intense frontier heist. Instead, you get ten whole minutes of sweeping a dirt floor with a pine branch. Ten minutes! I almost threw my phone across the bedroom. The friendship was sweet once they started baking, but the pacing crawls like a slug on dial-up. Double-speeding the cow milking scenes is basically mandatory for human survival.
3 critics · 3 lists →
#8
Eureka
Three hours and thirty-seven minutes of sepia-toned trauma recovery. A bus hijack happens fast, which got my hopes up, and then the movie hits a complete brick wall. The survivors just drive around the country in a converted tour bus without saying a word. I finished a full tournament bracket on mobile while they stared out a windshield. The road trip hits emotionally if you stick around, but my finger got severe cramps resisting the forward arrow.
#9
Drive My Car
Three hours of a red Saab cruising down highways while cassette tapes read theater lines. The opening credits do not show up until forty minutes in! I thought the movie was halfway over. The grief talk in the backseat is actually solid when they finally open up, but watching turn signals blink in real time almost broke my brain. Skip the scenic highway shots or you will end up elderly before the play finally starts.
3 critics · 3 lists →
#10
The Assassin
They promised martial arts, but gave me curtains fluttering in a gentle breeze. When a sword fight actually happens, it lasts three seconds and someone runs away behind a tree. The rest of the time, royalty sits on rugs drinking tea in absolute silence. The outfits look crazy crisp on an iPad screen, I will admit that. But waiting through ten minutes of blowing fog just for a dagger clink drove my thumb straight toward 2x.
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