3 Movies Like Shrek the Third (2007)

Consisting almost entirely of a single camera angle and long stretches of either silence or mundane conversation, The Plains makes for a particularly challenging—but incredibly unique—example of slow cinema. While its premise may seem almost too minimalist for its own good, the way the film is set up immediately draws us toward how distant people in the present day can be to each other despite our urbanized society. Stuck in this car with these two characters, one becomes hyperaware of how things are both moving too quickly and too slowly, and how so much of life is made up of the in-between moments. The film's fiction elements eventually break the docudrama illusion a little too bluntly (mainly through some suspiciously structured dialogue), but by then one should be too invested to want to get off.

Genre: Documentary, Drama

Actor: Andrew Rakowski, Cheri LeCornu, David Easteal, Inga Rakowski

Director: David Easteal

For a film with virtually no plot, there’s a lot of fuss going on in Oregon. The characters are constantly yelling and complaining, but the noise—like the plot, the set, and everything else about the film—is empty. The beauty of a Turkish summer is reduced to indoor sets, where much of the film takes place, and there here’s barely any movement, leaving us stuck with dialogue and half-baked backstories that don’t seem to serve any real purpose other than to fill in the film’s overlong runtime. The problems are superficial and solved almost immediately, purely by talking it seems, and there’s no attempt to connect the many disparate stories it shows. A farce like this could’ve worked if it got sillier and more ridiculous by the minute, but Oregon just goes in repetitive, unfunny circles. 

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Actor: Ali İpin, Alper Baytekin, Alper Saldıran, Aslı İnandık, Burcu Biricik, Ferit Aktuğ, Gün Akıncı, Melisa Doğu, Nazlı Bulum, Nejat İşler, Nevra Serezli, Onur Özaydın, Özgür Emre Yıldırım, Selen Uçer, Serkan Çayoğlu, Zihni Göktay

Director: Kerem Ayan