These days, film intellectuals often spend more time “contemplating the frame” than enjoying a movie, and directors seem to be making slower movies in a bid to be taken seriously. Long shots of characters eating or walking around and a plot that suddenly erupts out of nowhere in the last 20 minutes are sure signs that the film you’re watching is serious.

The Film Comment Selects series at Walter Reade Theater is the annual event held by Film Comment magazine, the last home of movie intellectualism in America. The lineup is wide-ranging, and it’s also a master class in the good and bad elements of slow.

Bad slowness in the series comes courtesy of Stanley Kwan’s “Everlasting Regret” (February 15, 19, 20) – a decades-long study of one woman’s life in Shanghai (you feel every minute). Shanghai is also the focus of “Shanghai Dreams” (February 16, 17, 20) – a riff on Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters” – about a family that yearns to return to bustling Shanghai after being relocated to the boring countryside.The slow-moving narrative comes together at the end of the film, but were the previous 100 minutes mood-building or proof of laziness?

Sri Lanka’s “The Forsaken Land” (February 24) is a movie that yearns to be liked but is impossible to enjoy. Beautifully shot, it’s about the ongoing war in Sri Lanka, and has been banned in that country despite winning the Camera d’Or at Cannes last year. A stream of unconnected scenes and vignettes devoid of the pleasures of narrative, it’s little more than a puff of pretty smoke.

But “Mountain Patrol: Kekexili” (February 25) shows that in the right hands, slowness can be a weapon. Based on a true story, it’s a grueling account of the running war between Tibetan pashmina poachers and the all-volunteer village patrols that oppose them in one of the most inhospitable environments on earth. If the altitude sickness, hypothermia, whiteouts, dehydration, quicksand, or starvation don’t kill our heroes, then the heavily armed poachers will. Bleakly beautiful, the devastation is all the more harrowing for being doled out at a measured pace.

“Workingman’s Death” (February 18 & 21) is a monumental documentary about some of the worst jobs on earth, and watching it is like getting hit in the head in slow motion. After watching these unfortunate souls get lost in the endless swamp of a Nigerian slaughterhouse, trapped in the choking blackness of a Chinese steel mill, or wedged into a tiny crevice hundreds of feet underground scooping out coal, you just want to get out of these hellholes and forget about the people who make their living there.

The Irish horror flick “Isolation” (February 18, 19, 21), about a killer baby cow, collapses after it abandons its slow techniques for standard issue horror movie tropes, but by then it’s already subjected viewers to extremely upsetting images of life down on the farm. And Shinya Tsukamoto’s “Haze,” a short film shown as part of “Three Short Digital Films” (February 23 & 24), is sheer plotless terror. Mr. Tsukamoto himself plays a man who wakes up trapped in a concrete crawl space, unable to find a way out or remember how he got there. Then things get really nasty. Mr. Tsukamoto has made the ultimate slow movie: a movie so grueling and relentless that you wind up begging for it to stop, but it keeps going on, and on, and on …

Until February 28 (Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, 212-496-3809).