What are the best movies about waiting?
The best movies about waiting include Drive My Car for its meditative pacing, Waiting for Godot for existential irony, Jeanne Dielman for domestic endurance, The Terminal for liminal patience, and Jarhead for modern war-time stasis. These titles make stillness meaningful boredom becomes a vehicle for insight and emotional clarity.
How We Selected These Films
Our Research and Curation Process
This list is drawn from festival coverage, film criticism, and academic writing on slow cinema and duration. We considered pieces published by major outlets and institutions — including BFI, Sight & Sound, Criterion, and peer-reviewed film journals — and weighed artistic impact, accessibility, and thematic significance. The final set balances philosophical depth, craft, and viewer experience.
Key Criteria We Evaluated
We judged each film by:
- Philosophical resonance — the depth of its engagement with waiting
- Cinematic craft — use of long takes, sound, and composition
- Viewer payoff — how patience rewards the audience emotionally or intellectually
- Cultural relevance — influence and recognition in film discourse
- Accessibility — its ability to engage general cinephiles despite slow pacing
Quick Comparison Overview
Our top picks range from compact, accessible meditations to marathon endurance works. Drive My Car leads for emotional precision, while Jeanne Dielman epitomizes radical domestic repetition. From military ennui (Jarhead) to political patient-witnessing (Death in the Land of Encantos), these films use waiting to reveal character, context, and consequence.
The 15 Best Movies About Waiting — Ranked
1. Drive My Car (2021) – Best Overall for Meditative Waiting
What We Love: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car treats time as a medium. Conversations and silences in the car become small excavations of grief and memory; the film’s patient rhythm refuses cinematic hurry. Scenes that might feel incidental in other films accumulate here, each one deepening our understanding of the lead’s inner life. The nearly three-hour running time is used to let emotion arise slowly rather than be declared.
The film’s restraint pays off: textures of performance, translation, and rehearsal reveal themselves across long takes. Hamaguchi balances intimate close-ups with quiet spatial shots, so the viewer learns to listen. By the end, the film has converted waiting into a kind of attention — not idle time, but a way of being with loss and art.
Considerations: Requires patience — its slow pacing may deter casual viewers.
Best For: Those seeking emotional catharsis through stillness.
Rating: ★★★★★ (9.5/10)
2. Waiting for Godot (1953/Film Adaptations) – Best for Existential Absurdity
What We Love: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, in its theatrical and filmed versions, stages waiting as a human condition. The two protagonists fill gaps with jokes, small tasks, and philosophical circling, and that repetition exposes how people cling to hope and companionship. The work’s spare setup magnifies the emotional stakes of small gestures: a hat passed, a routine kept, the patient expectation of an arrival that never happens.
On screen, the empty landscape and reserved staging emphasize absence and presence at once. The drama’s power comes from that tension: a play where “nothing” happens that nevertheless forces attention to how people survive boredom and uncertainty by simply staying together.
Considerations: Theatrical in nature; minimal action.
Best For: Viewers drawn to existential and absurdist humor.
Rating: ★★★★★ (9.3/10)
3. Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) – Best for Domestic Endurance
What We Love: Chantal Akerman’s film turns routine into a revealing ledger. Household tasks — grocery shopping, meal prep, phone calls — are filmed with sustained, steady observation, and through that patience we watch a woman’s life compressed into repetition. Those repeated gestures expose labor that’s usually invisible; each small act accrues meaning until the weight becomes tangible. The film’s deliberate tempo invites the viewer to notice what’s usually ignored.
Akerman’s formal choices — static framing, exacting shot length — make the domestic sphere feel monumental. The film asks you to sit with the ordinary long enough for its human cost and psychological pressure to register. Watching it is a test of attention, but one that transforms the way you see the everyday.
Considerations: Its 3-hour-plus runtime and long, static shots demand full attention.
Best For: Viewers interested in feminist film and slow cinema.
Rating: ★★★★★ (9.2/10)
4. Jarhead (2005) – Best War Film About Waiting Instead of Fighting
What We Love: Sam Mendes’s Jarhead flips the war movie script: the main conflict is monotony and thwarted expectation rather than combat. The Marines’ days are filled with drills, waiting, and an odd, anxious suspense — a tension that gnaws at morale. Mendes uses desert vistas and wide frames to show the men enveloped by space and time, where the horizon becomes a visual echo of stalled purpose.
Jake Gyllenhaal’s central performance anchors the film’s psychic weariness. Cinematography and sound design make boredom tactile, converting listlessness into a kind of psychological pressure cooker. The film shows that waiting itself can be traumatic; the absence of battle doesn’t make the experience less real or intense.
Considerations: May frustrate those expecting action.
Best For: Viewers intrigued by the psychological toll of military boredom.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (8.9/10)
5. The Terminal (2004) – Best for Finding Peace in Liminal Spaces
What We Love: Steven Spielberg turns an airport into a human neighborhood where delay becomes daily life. Viktor Navorski adapts: he builds routine, finds workarounds, and forges small relationships. The film treats waiting as a chance to remake identity — not a punishment but a slow process of human connection and practical invention. Warm performances and attention to small gestures keep the story grounded.
Spielberg mixes warmth and melancholy so the airport feels alive rather than sterile. Over time, what was meant to isolate the protagonist becomes the setting for modest personal growth. The film shows patience as a resource: if you stay long enough, you can build a life even in transit.
Considerations: Sentimental tone may divide critics.
Best For: Fans of humanist storytelling and quiet perseverance.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (8.8/10)
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6. The Turin Horse (2011) – Best for Pure Existential Waiting
What We Love: Béla Tarr’s austere film reduces days to elemental acts — fetching water, stoking fires, eating. Those repeated motions add up into a liturgy of survival. Tarr’s long takes and monochrome palette cultivate a sense of weather and ritual; the world here is stripped down until only essentials remain, and waiting becomes a way to measure endurance.
The film is merciless in its pacing, but that severity creates space for a different kind of attention. Sound and rhythm become central: wind, footsteps, the scrape of a chair. The result feels like a philosophical exhale — an insistence that life continues in tiny, repetitive tasks even as meaning frays.
Considerations: Intensely slow, bordering on hypnotic.
Best For: Hardcore cinephiles and seekers of minimalist transcendence.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (8.8/10)
7. Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) – Best for Political Waiting
What We Love: Lav Diaz’s epic uses extraordinary duration to document neglect and the experience of citizens waiting for relief. Long stretches of observational footage place viewers in the same slow time as survivors of a disaster; the delay of promised assistance becomes visible, and bureaucracy’s pace turns into a moral issue. Diaz blends fiction and documentary provocation so the wait is both lived and reported.
Duration here is a political tool: stretching scenes makes you live the delay rather than merely watch it. The film’s length itself insists that some stories can’t be compressed without losing urgency. It’s demanding, but intentionally so — an ethical call to notice what systems make people endure.
Considerations: Nine-hour runtime tests even the most patient viewers.
Best For: Viewers exploring cinema as political endurance.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (8.7/10)
8. Crude Oil (2008) – Best for Industrial Waiting
What We Love: Wang Bing’s monumental documentary watches workers on the oil fields in near-real time. There’s no score and no voice-over — only the cadence of labor and the machine’s steady hum. By committing to long observational frames, the film makes waiting look like work: a condition shaped by shifts, meals, maintenance, and downtime. The length of the piece forces the audience to share the workers’ temporality.
The effect is blunt and honest. When you live inside that time, concepts like productivity and meaning bend; the film becomes a record of labor’s overlooked endurance. It’s a challenging viewing but a necessary one for anyone interested in how modern economies structure human time.
Considerations: Requires a gallery-like mindset; best experienced in segments.
Best For: Documentary lovers and art installation enthusiasts.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (8.6/10)
9. My Dinner with Andre (1981) – Best for Conversational Waiting
What We Love: Louis Malle’s movie is essentially two people and a table, and that simplicity is the point. The dinner conversation moves from personal anecdotes to philosophical detours, and the audience is asked to wait for insight to emerge from talk — not from action. That patient listening invites self-reflection; the film treats conversation as a form of shared time.
The camera’s restraint makes every inflection matter. As the evening unfolds, perspectives shift and the silence between sentences becomes meaningful. Watching it feels like eavesdropping on a long, honest human exchange where the reward is a change in how you look at ordinary life.
Considerations: Dialogue-heavy; minimal visual variation.
Best For: Thinkers who enjoy philosophical dialogue and slow realism.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (8.6/10)
10. The Passenger (1975) – Best for Suspended Observation
What We Love: Antonioni’s film is a study in liminality: a man slips into another identity and drifts through landscapes that feel both anonymous and charged. The director’s long takes and patient camera encourage the viewer to observe rather than infer, turning waiting into a form of looking. Those stretches give us time to notice surfaces, architecture, and the small ways people reveal themselves.
The famous long take near the end is less a stunt and more an ethical demand: sit still and watch. The film suggests that identity and meaning are not outcomes but durations, and that waiting itself can reveal what action cannot.
Considerations: Ambiguous pacing and elliptical structure may challenge some.
Best For: Viewers fascinated by existential travel and visual poetry.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (8.5/10)
11. The Pigeon (2018) – Best for Solitary Reflection
What We Love: This Turkish film follows a man who withdraws to a rooftop and cares for pigeons, and that withdrawal is framed as a conscious refusal of social scripts. The rhythms of feeding and watching birds become a kind of moral practice; in refusing conventional domestic roles, the protagonist reclaims time. The film’s small scale keeps its focus intimate and humane.
Its quiet composition and minimal dialogue make waiting an active stance: a way to resist and to recover. The roof is both refuge and vantage point, and the film’s patience allows subtle interior shifts to register slowly — so the viewer experiences change almost imperceptibly.
Considerations: Sparse dialogue; relies heavily on visual storytelling.
Best For: Viewers drawn to introspective and minimalist world cinema.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (8.5/10)
12. All the Mornings of the World (1991) – Best for Musical Stillness
What We Love: Alain Corneau’s period piece locates waiting within artistic discipline: a composer’s silence and repetition become the crucible for expression. Practice, loss, and devotion unfold in candlelit interiors where pauses between notes carry huge emotional weight. Music replaces speech as the film’s main language, and that sonic waiting creates a sharp kind of attention.
The film’s visual restraint complements its musical patience. Watching rehearsals, corrections, and quiet rehearsals teaches you to hear time the way an instrument does: in breath, in rest, and in the gradual shaping of phrase.
Considerations: Period pacing and archaic dialogue may deter casual viewers.
Best For: Fans of meditative music dramas and historical melancholy.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (8.4/10)
13. Columbus (2017) – Best for Architectural Contemplation
What We Love: Kogonada’s debut is a study of space and the pauses between human encounters. The actors’ exchanges are full of polite hesitation and deliberate stillness; architecture acts as another character, and the film’s rhythm asks viewers to look slowly. Frames are composed with a designer’s eye, so silence becomes a way of reading structures and emotions at the same time.
The result is tender and exact. Pauses are not empty but structural: they let the scene breathe and let ideas sink in. For anyone who enjoys films that reward observation, Columbus makes waiting feel rich and warm.
Considerations: Minimal narrative progression; highly aestheticized pacing.
Best For: Fans of contemplative cinema and architectural beauty.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (8.4/10)
14. Stranger Than Paradise (1984) – Best for Ironic Waiting
What We Love: Jim Jarmusch captures boredom with wry economy. Characters drift through locales, and the film’s pauses and deadpan reactions highlight the comedic and melancholic possibilities of doing nothing. Its black-and-white austerity reinforces a sense of drift, and the repeated fades underline how days blur into one another for the characters.
Jarmusch’s humor is cool and understated; the film treats waiting as an everyday mode of being where small details — a cigarette, a look — become meaningful by virtue of repetition.
Considerations: Dry tone and minimal emotional payoff.
Best For: Fans of indie minimalism and 1980s deadpan comedy.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (8.3/10)
15. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) – Best for Narrative Futility
What We Love: On the surface it’s peak action-adventure. Read a little more closely, though, and Raiders is an ironic study in cause and effect: much of Indy’s heroism turns out to be supplementary to larger forces at work. The film’s urgency and setpieces cast waiting as part of a larger machine — characters rush toward events that would play out with or without them.
That interpretive twist makes the film interesting in the context of waiting: even fast-paced stories can contain an element of futility, and that tension between action and outcome can be a kind of philosophical waiting in disguise.
Considerations: Traditional pacing masks its philosophical undertone.
Best For: Mainstream audiences open to ironic reinterpretation.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (8.2/10)
How to Choose the Right “Cinema of Waiting” for You
Consider Your Patience Threshold
If you want an approachable start, choose The Terminal or Columbus. If you’re ready to test your endurance, work up to The Turin Horse or Crude Oil. Your tolerance for silence, repetition, and long takes will determine the payoff.
Match Mood to Theme
Craving solitude and introspection? Try Drive My Car or My Dinner with Andre. Want political engagement? Pick Death in the Land of Encantos. For existential rigor, Jeanne Dielman and The Turin Horse will take you deepest.
Don’t Overlook the Visuals
Many of these films make waiting cinematic through composition, sound, and architecture. Notice framing and ambient sound — these artists communicate as much through space as through plot.
Honorable Mentions and Alternatives
Other notable works worth seeking out: Inside Llewyn Davis (creative stagnation), Tokyo Story (familial waiting), and Paterson (poetic repetition). Each treats stillness as a kind of rhythm and adds nuance to the cinema of patience.
Closing Thoughts
The Cinema of Waiting asks you to slow down and pay attention. These fifteen films show that delay isn’t emptiness; it’s a place where character, context, and conscience emerge. Whether you respond to tenderness, irony, or endurance, there’s a work here that makes waiting something to watch for — and to learn from. (Last updated: October 2025)
FAQs
What is the best movie about waiting overall?
A: Drive My Car (2021) stands out for its patient clarity — it converts silence and repetition into emotional insight without resorting to melodrama.
Which slow film is ideal for beginners?
A: The Terminal or Columbus are friendly entry points — emotionally accessible and visually rewarding without heavy austerity.
What is the slowest or longest movie on the list?
A: Crude Oil runs roughly 14 hours; Lav Diaz’s Death in the Land of Encantos is about nine hours — both are designed as marathon experiences.
Are slow or “boring” movies worth watching?
A: Yes. Seen on their own terms, slow films deepen perception: they reveal human detail that faster cutting often obscures.
Which film best represents political waiting?
A: Death in the Land of Encantos uses long duration to expose bureaucratic delay and collective endurance in the face of disaster.
What defines “cinema of waiting”?
A: Films that center stillness, repetition, and duration over narrative urgency — inviting the audience to experience time as a subject.
