A while back, a bit of a dust-up erupted between some film critics at the New York Times. The topic was the matter of “slow and boring” films—also known as “stately, meditative” films, depending on who you talk to. The lines were drawn between Dan Kois, who in his New York Times Magazine essay “Eating Your Cultural Vegetables,” owned up to half-napping through every “deliberately-paced” drama his fellow critics raved about. The rejoinder came more than a month later, when Kois’ co-workers A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis struck back with “In Defense of Slow and Boring,” which spread like unhurried wildfire across Facebook and Twitter, eagerly shared by more patient cineastes who don’t (like Kois) regard film viewing as a “performative” aspect of the larger gesture of taste-making. (Unless of course they’re so entrenched in the performance that they’d champion treatises they don’t believe in defending films they don’t actually enjoy. But that’s a bit cynical.)