10 Slowest Movies of All Time

The 10 Slowest Movies of All Time, Ranked Image via Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Published Jul 31, 2026, 8:24 AM EDT Jeremy has more than 2700 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account There’s a time and a place for fast-paced movies, and honestly, it might be most of the time, and in most of the places. Fast-paced movies are great. It’s almost always thrilling to sit back and, you know, be thrilled for a couple of hours, with plenty of blockbusters and overall popular movies delivering on that front (see Mad Max: Fury Road, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Raid, just for starters). If you're not feeling in the mood for something fast, and are in the mood for something even slower than In the Mood for Love, maybe check out some of the following films. They're among the slowest of all time, with quite a few being arthouse movies that aren’t particularly well-known, though at least a couple are iconic (or maybe infamous). To keep some variety here, not all of these are slow-paced for a very long time, with some slow shorter movies mentioned below alongside films that are epic-length, and arguably endurance tests (of sorts) at the same time. 10 'Nostos: The Return' (1989) Image via Mikado Film At the time of writing, the most recent movie to tackle the story of The Odyssey is the 2026 film of that very name directed by Christopher Nolan. You'd be hard-pressed to find many people calling that one slow, even with the runtime being nearly three hours, which sounds challenging on paper… but that movie really moves. There is a good deal of action, and the spectacle is overwhelming (honestly, in a good way). It downplays the fantasy elements of The Odyssey and feels like more of a grounded and introspective drama, all being about evoking a certain mood. If you want something a little more measured, though, you do always have Nostos: The Return, which is The Odyssey, but done in an arthouse way. It downplays the fantasy elements of The Odyssey and feels like more of a grounded and introspective drama, all being about evoking a certain mood while still technically retaining the story of “There’s this guy, and he wants to go home.” It’s interesting, albeit very slow, hence it being here and stuff. 9 'Goodbye, Dragon Inn' (2003) Image via Homegreen Films Conceptually, Goodbye, Dragon Inn is an intriguing movie, and maybe even an almost compelling one, since it’s about a cinema that is screening one final film before closing forever: Dragon Inn, the martial arts classic directed by King Hu. It’s not quite a film that plays out in real-time, since Dragon Inn is about 20 minutes longer than Goodbye, Dragon Inn, but the effect is still pretty close to watching people watch Dragon Inn in real-time. It’s really boring, as well, but the idea is super interesting, and Goodbye, Dragon Inn does indeed achieve what it set out to do, so perhaps on that front, it can’t really be faulted. The entire movie is sleep-inducing at the same time that it manages to feel sad in an undeniable and quiet sort of way. It’s another film, like Nostos: The Return, that’s kind of aggressive in just how arthouse it ultimately wants to be. 8 'The Sacrifice' (1986) Image via Sandrew Andrei Tarkovsky might well have saved his slowest film for last, because The Sacrifice was the last feature-length movie he ever directed, and it really does take its time and then some. Summarizing the plot will probably make it sound a fair bit more exciting, though, since it’s about people dealing with the idea that the end of the world might be imminent, owing to nuclear war starting… apparently. It all happens at a birthday gathering, so maybe that makes the premise a bit comparable to something like Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which is about a rogue planet approaching the Earth, and takes place during – and around – a wedding. Melancholia looks like a blockbuster in comparison to The Sacrifice, though, which is very methodically paced and always some level of quiet and contemplative. It’s tedious, though there is thankfully quite a bit by way of striking imagery featured throughout. 7 'Songs from the Second Floor' (2000) Image via Canal+ Songs from the Second Floor is awful. People will try to tell you it’s good, and good for them, finding something here, or at least believing that they’ve found something here, but this is pure tedium for 99 minutes, and the sort of film that feels hateful. Roy Andersson makes nothing movies that purposefully waste your time, and people bending over backwards to try and find meaning here are being pranked. Sorry, but it’s terrible. It’s a terrible movie. Songs from the Second Floor has a bunch of static shots that aren’t really connected to one another, with the “premise” here being that there’s just a city filled with people, and they're all miserable. Life is falling apart for different people in different ways, and everything is very still, and stilted. It’s deeply annoying, and about as pretentious as one could imagine a film ever being. 6 '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) Easily the most well-known movie here, calling 2001: A Space Odyssey slow feels a little iffy, because it condenses so much time (history and speculation about the future) into a single movie. It’s about evolution and humanity’s future, being made up of several segments that take place at different times, though even with it spanning so much time, there is still a patience to the way it’s all paced. And, at times, 2001: A Space Odyssey can feel very slow, with all the drifting through space and sequences that don’t technically move the plot forward, when there is even the feeling of there being a plot in the first place. Everything adds up and feels necessary, though, and then the sheer spectacle found in some of the more measured parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey is undeniable. Slow’s not bad, and also, debatably, 2001: A Space Odyssey is only slow from a certain point of view. 5 'Memoria' (2021) Image via Neon Memoria is hard to classify within certain genres, and difficult to summarize, because not much happens, and what little does happen happens without much clarity or explanation. There is a woman at the movie’s center, and she starts to hear strange noises out of nowhere, which makes her set off to try to find the source of such noises, and then things get weirder. The pacing here is uniquely slow, even among other movies that are slow-paced. It might be hard to lock into a movie like Memoria, and click with what it’s trying to do, but if you can, the experience it provides is quite something. It’s a very eerie and successfully surreal film, and there are sights and sounds here that prove genuinely hard to shake, even long after the movie itself is over. 4 'An Elephant Sitting Still' (2018) Image via KimStim Among the heaviest dramas of all time, An Elephant Sitting Still is a very long movie, at nearly four hours in length, and then there isn't much plot to fill up all those hours. It’s more of a character study, with a handful of people navigating difficult lives and dealing with fairly mundane struggles. Beyond dealing with hardships, these people are also drawn together by a shared desire to see the famed elephant referred to in the title. Though slow and without much by way of outward drama happening, An Elephant Sitting Still is unusually riveting, not really sitting still itself… more just moving very slowly and purposefully. It’s hard to emphasize or explain just how and why this film works as well as it does, but it just does. It’s challenging and harrowing in the best and most effective of ways. 3 'Winter Sleep' (2014) Image via Pinema It was released the same year, and also contains “Winter S” as part of its title, but don’t get Captain America: The Winter Soldier mixed up with Winter Sleep, by any means. Or do get it mixed up with that one. That would be kind of funny. And that’s what you get for only looking at the year of release and that specific part of the title in both cases. One’s a fast-paced superhero movie with spy/thriller elements, and the other is a heavy-going art film with an epic-length runtime. Winter Sleep certainly isn't an epic in the conventional sense, though, since there aren’t too many characters and the main drama it features is very introspective and personal. The whole thing does feel a bit tedious, and maybe overlong, but also, all that’s kind of the point, so mission accomplished? Maybe? Eh, who knows anymore. It could well be better to simply sleep through this one. 2 'Satantango' (1994) Image via Vega Film One of the all-time most iconic/infamous cinematic endurance tests, Satantango is indeed that movie that’s over seven hours long, stays depressing throughout, and doesn’t have all that much happen considering the runtime. Call it a psychological drama if you want, maybe, because exploring some characters is all you really get here, rather than there being a narrative. Like, there are a bunch of people, they live in a destitute village, and they're all miserable. Absolute misery, and little else but, for 432 minutes. That’s Satantango. You want more to say? There’s nothing more to say. Also, the movie doesn’t say much else, at least not on the surface, or maybe not even under the surface, either. Dig into it all you want, or dismiss it as one of those naked emperors. The choice is yours… but, for a third option: ignore it, and be happy you’ve never spent seven hours hacking your way through it. This emperor isn't just unclothed, he’s been flayed, and still no one wants to tell him. 1 'Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles' (1975) Image via Olympic Films A few days are covered throughout Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, with the film almost feeling like it plays out in real-time. At a bit over three hours in length, it’s more like one hour or so spent on each day, but the film’s deliberately paced in a manner where you really do feel the tedium that the titular Jeanne Dielman has to deal with, and it’s undeniably challenging to sit with that. It’s further depressing to think about her (fictional, yes, but still) life expanding well beyond that, with Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles driving home a certain lack of appreciation for Jeanne and other women like her. There’s a little more to the movie than that, but not much. It’s brutally slow and successfully despairing, being one of the more challenging “classic” and widely acclaimed movies out there for sure.