I somewhat disagree about the desired reaction of a slow film to potentially feel slow. I think to slow down the pace of the film is a technique used to acquire a more interesting connection to the material for the viewer. The desire is to be interesting and the way the filmmaker sees best to attain that is to be slow.

I think part of the stigma is also due to the term 'fast-paced' constantly used as a positive quality. If 'fast' is always used to equate to exciting, then 'slow' will always be taken to mean boring. Perhaps the issue isn't with the word slow but with the (over)use of 'fast-paced' to be used as a positive descriptor.

I somewhat disagree about the desired reaction of a slow film to potentially feel slow. I think to slow down the pace of the film is a technique used to acquire a more interesting connection to the material for the viewer. The desire is to be interesting and the way the filmmaker sees best to attain that is to be slow.

I think part of the stigma is also due to the term 'fast-paced' constantly used as a positive quality. If 'fast' is always used to equate to exciting, then 'slow' will always be taken to mean boring. Perhaps the issue isn't with the word slow but with the (over)use of 'fast-paced' to be used as a positive descriptor.

I agree that it's connotation is almost always negative, but that's the problem because there's no inherent qualitative distinction within the word itself. In your comment you equate the common usage of “slow” to be analogous to the use of “uneventful,” and while I would agree that they are commonly used synonymously, I take major issue with the fact that people see these as negative qualities. Filmmakers like Tarkovsky, Melville, Jarmusch, Haneke, Aki Kaurismaki, and the more recent work of Kelly Reichardt and Ramin Bahrani have aptly demonstrated that the lack of event is not antithetical to being wholly cinematic, or a good movie. I agree that there are aprropriate (albeit rarely) uses of slow as a negative characterization in film-criticism, but the major problem is that the knee-jerk reaction to films such as these is outright dismissal and an adamant refusal to meet a film halfway simply because of the stigma of its pacing. It's highly problematic when the critic rejects a slow film simply by virtue of its pace, and I think anybody who treats cinema seriously should at least attempt to evaluate the merits of such an approach. I think this timidity of slow films is the end result of the constant (mis)use of the term. There is nothing more or less cinematic about any given pace.

Lastly, I agree that there's probably a better example out there than my horror example, but I think the intentionality of slowly-paced filmmaking very much exists. I think if filmgoers didn't find a film by Tarkovsky or Reygadas slow, these filmmakers would feel they have failed, because they see the values and virtues of what such a pace can achieve. I think Tarkovsky very much intended his films to come across as slow, as evidenced by the endless highway scene on Solaris and his scribblings about his deliberate oacing in Sculpting in Time. He truly believed that only through such a style can the filmmaker capture nature and truth. Yes, we use words like 'meticulous' and 'deliberate' to make the slow pace not sound so bad, but in the end I wish the word 'slow' could safely be used as a merely descriptive term without stigma in film criticism.

I agree that slow does not equal boring, but I disagree that it can't be used as a replacement when describing a film – especially when most people will understand it as a statement that one didn't particularly enjoy the film, or at least felt that the film is as long as it is, or felt longer.

I also disagree that calling a slow film slow is the same as calling a horror film scary. Fear, for the most part, is the desired reaction to a horror film while feeling the slowness of a movie isn't always. A horror film being scary is like a comedy being funny. A horror film won't be considered bad or disliked because it's scary (unless you don't like scary movies, and therefore shouldn't be watching horror films), nor a comedy because it's funny (unless you don't like to laugh, in which case you're a hopeless human being), but the desire of a slow film isn't necessarily to feel slow while being slow.