Napoleon Dynamite
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.
Slow West is a great film about a man going to America to find a girl he grew up with in Scotland. It’s got Fassbender in it.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Most of these are just slow by modern standards, MTV changed film editing for good
Into the Wild is pretty minimal once he moved to Alaska
The Master is very minimal of plot but the opposite of relaxing
Peanut butter falcon is amazing.
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
Rubber
Seriously, give this movie a shot.
I have to assume people will have different ideas of minimal, but I just watched Love Me, and I think it counts
Other movies
- Moon.
- Cast Away
- 127 Hrs
- 2001: A space odyssey
- Hateful Eight
I’d recommend First Cow
Melancholia.
Coffee and Cigarettes
Clerks (but just the first one)
I don’t know if I would call Clerks a slow-paced movie, like the plot barely advances at all throughout the entire movie, and I get that, but the movie is not really about the plot, it’s about a series of seemingly unconnected events that happen in an average, nondescript location in New Jersey, and getting to people watch as the weirdness erupts around the one seemingly normal person in the entire film.
I used to love Clerks when I was a teenager, but after rewatching it as an adult (along with a few other Kevin Smith movies), I feel like I outgrew it. It’s edgy and the characters have good chemistry and was shot well, but end of the day, kinda just juvenile and the dialog pretentious. I get why it was criticized as such.
kinda just juvenile and the dialog pretentious
You literally just described Kevin Smith…
I think I like these movies because I’m also juvenile and pretentious.
It’s been a long time since I watched it but I found Bladerunner very slow paced.
It dat noir, baby!
i wouldn’t know. when i watch movies, i watchitfortheplot.
My Dinner With André
