I have a similar problem and it involves so far large tiff files. I always had issues with applications freezing on Ubuntu. For these using strace always revealed underlying reasons. Most the time it was unaccessible network drives. However, in this case it seems to be that nautilus trying to read the whole file or is in some kind of loop within the reading process of the file. The file I have is 19GB on external HDD.
I have a similar problem and it involves so far large tiff files. I always had issues with applications freezing on Ubuntu. For these using strace always revealed underlying reasons. Most the time it was unaccessible network drives. However, in this case it seems to be that nautilus trying to read the whole file or is in some kind of loop within the reading process of the file. The file I have is 19GB on external HDD.