Being a Silver Age Soluter – a term I just made up, which comes with double prize money – I wasn’t there for the original Taco Break, in which Soluters were asked at what point they’d pause a movie. You know, to get up, move around, and maybe get a taco. So I’ve had a long time to contemplate my answer. It’s interesting because back in 2014ish, I had just got my life into a semblance of order and had to deal with the fact that I hadn’t watched a movie in years because my attention span was completely ruined, so for a while I would habitually pause a movie when I realised my attention had wandered too far. In fact, I came to judge movies by how well they fought my addled attention; I rated Rope (and the works of Hitchcock in general) quite highly because I only felt the need to pause it once.

(Weirdly, at the absolute depths of my ability to focus, Alien proved a good movie, not in spite of but because of its slow pace. It gave me time to absorb the entirety of the screen.)

These days I trust my instincts a lot better and believe that if my attention wanders during a movie, it’s because it sucks. It’s only really with a movie three hours or longer with deeply episodic structure that I feel the need to pause a film outside of it sucking, if only to stretch my legs at the halfway mark. Oppenheimer flew by the second time I watched it because Nolan works to keep the imagery shifting and changing, for example. I think the last movie I paused was Dune, and I never ended up going back to it!

At what point do you pause a film for a break? If you answered last time, how has your perspective changed because of life circumstances?