In three hours and 26 minutes, you could run the London Marathon. You could fly from the UK to New York on the “Son of Concorde” (for a very high price). You could slow cook a very rich and very tender beef shin ragu, and hand-roll the pasta to have with it. Or you could watch Martin Scorsese’s new film, Killers of the Flower Moon.
Three hours and 26 minutes – off-putting, isn’t it? Rather than a nice night at the pictures, it becomes a daunting feat of stamina and strength, for which one must mentally prepare, carboload, hydrate, and it’s worth having a torch, lighter and waterproof on hand, too. There could have been a nuclear apocalypse by the time you emerge from the cinema and turn your phone back on. You just don’t run that risk with a 90-minute romcom.
Long films are indulgent. They’re boring. They are almost always the result of hundreds and hundreds of people fuelling one male ego, one auteur everybody’s scared to suggest might want an edit. Almost every sprawling magnum opus ought to be condensed down into something more manageable for the viewer (or turned into a television series). People have got other things to do. People have jobs. My own job happens to actually involve watching films and even I can’t summon the energy.
A quick scan of the IMDb’s list of top-ranking films more than three and a half hours long unfortunately confirms that I have missed out on many bloated so-called classics. King Kong (2005) – fell asleep. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003) – fell asleep. Schindler’s List (1993) – why would you split such an important film across two DVDs? It was a lot of effort to get up and put the second one in. (I do feel guilty about this one.)
I made it through The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), but given how much of it involved Leonardo DiCaprio snorting cocaine from various of Margot Robbie’s exposed body parts I rather wished I had fallen asleep rather than sat in the cinema, uncomfortably alert, with my dad (great film though and one of the few that warrants the runtime).
I asked my colleagues, who agreed: no good film has ever been longer than three hours.
Well, except for…
The Godfather Part II (1974)
“I don’t feel I have to wipe everybody out. Just my enemies.” The Godfather II is the ultimate exception that proves the rule. It’s three hours and 22 minutes long, every one of them dazzling, most of them filled with words to live by from Michael Corleone. We travel to Sicily, to Nevada, to New York, to Cuba; it’s a study of honesty, family, loyalty; class, trust, revenge. It is exquisite to look at, the score is foreboding, every character essential both to the story and to what they have grown to represent in (forgive me the pretension here please) the cinematic canon. Mainly though, it is really exciting, and scary, and sad, and that just about gets me to sit still.
Sarah Carson, Culture Editor
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Halfway through Martin Scorsese’s three-hour-and-29-minute-long 2019 film The Irishman, I had to get up and do a downward dog to get the blood flowing to my limbs again and remind myself I was still alive. A few weeks after that, I watched the epic Doctor Zhivago, and remembered that if a three-hour film is absorbing and beautiful, I don’t need to do any yoga power moves to get through it. Omar Sharif and Julie Christie as star-crossed lovers among bleak, brooding Russian landscapes is the perfect Saturday afternoon film, with its soaring score. Not much action, but a whole lot of humanity – and I wouldn’t want it to be a minute shorter.
Kasia Delgado, Chief Feature Writer
Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013)
I don’t think I’ve seen someone eat spaghetti with such utter unselfconsciousness as Adèle Exarchopoulos in Blue Is the Warmest Colour. Everything she does in this film, in fact, is full of hunger, desire and zeal, and she acts with such naturalism it feels almost intrusive to watch. In my eyes, all credit for this three-hour French lesbian drama goes not to its writer-director Abdellatif Kechiche – who by all accounts was not a pleasant man to work with – but to Exarchopoulos and her co-star Léa Seydoux, who improvised much of their characters’ relationship and in so doing capture burgeoning queer love like few others I’ve seen. Yes it’s long, but that just allows us to wallow and bask in every awkward, beautiful, painful moment.
Alexandra Pollard, Deputy Culture Editor
Napoléon (1927)
The silent classic Napoléon comes in at around five and a half hours – tough to get through in a single seating, but insert an interval or two and the time just speeds by. From the opening scene of an extended snowball fight led by a schoolboy Bonaparte, through to the epic finale, which requires three separate screens to be experienced in its full glory, Abel Gance’s masterpiece is proof that a film is only too long if its creators are incapable of holding their viewers’ attention. Just a shame he never got round to making the five sequels he’d planned!
Hugo Gye, Political Editor
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Three hours and 21 minutes. That was the length of the original cinema release of the final instalment of Peter Jackson’s epic The Lord of the Rings adaptation. But as the sort of geeky teenager who tried to emulate Elf princess Arwen by making her own “Evenstar” necklace, I bought the extended version on DVD, which Google tells me added another 53 minutes to the running time. No, I can’t remember exactly what the extra hour included, and yes I do stick to the standard version whenever I rewatch today. Yet if my friends and I were riveted by four and a half hours of this stuff, then surely it deserves to last at least three.
After all, this is the big, dramatic close to a trilogy that dominated cinema in the early noughties – and its plot is more intricate than that of any of the previous films. We don’t just follow Frodo, Sam and Gollum legging it to Mordor to destroy the ring; we see Aragorn, Legolas, Gandalf, Merry and Pippin venture to Minas Tirith to wage war against Sauron’s armies.
People complain about the interminable battle scenes and I agree that if the film were shorter, it would have been an endless stream of unwashed men stabbing monsters. But at this length, Jackson finds room for beautiful, truly awe-inspiring segments, such as shots of the beacons of Minas Tirith being lit across snow-capped mountain ranges, accompanied by Howard Shore’s stirring score (“Gondor calls for aid!” “And Rohan will answer.”). Then there’s the conclusion to the tender romance between Arwen and Aragorn, for which, aged 13, I was of course a complete sucker.
The core appeal of The Lord of the Rings is the total immersion provided by Tolkien’s world. This is a film that prompted megafans like me to learn Elvish in our spare time (“Namarië!”). We could definitely handle a mere three and a bit hours at the cinema.
Gwendolyn Smith, Associate Culture Editor
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
When Lawrence of Arabia was re-released in 1970, 35 minutes were chopped out of it – and it was still more than three hours long. But I love the full version that’s now on Netflix, all three hours and 47 minutes of it. The vastness of the desert suits David Lean’s epic directing style, and the story is so compelling that, at the end, I always wish he had made a sequel. To paraphrase Lawrence: certainly it’s long, the trick is not minding that it’s long. If only Scorsese took one lesson from Lean: it’s ok to include an intermission for a loo break.
Rob Hastings, Special Projects Editor
Titanic (1997)
It took two hours and 40 minutes for the Titanic to sink after hitting that iceberg – exactly the amount of time James Cameron’s romantic tragedy spends on the ill-fated boat telling the timeless, just on the right side of cheesy love story of Jack and Rose. Coincidence? Of course not and, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a good enough reason for Titanic to run for more than three hours. The extra 45 minutes are spent either getting everyone on the boat (crucial to the plot, I think we can all agree) or in the modern day, where we watch an elderly Rose share her trauma and chuck the Heart of the Ocean into the sea. I wouldn’t shave a minute off this masterpiece.
Emily Baker, TV Editor
Barry Lyndon (1975)
Not long ago, I went to the BFI for a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon – beautiful, dark, hilarious, underrated and a full three hours, five minutes long. Essentially summing up a life in the space of a few hours, it should be watched by all.
Equally important: it has an intermission. So long as people know it’s coming, they shouldn’t have clambered over your knees to pay a visit in the first half. When it does come, you can safely stretch your legs, buy a drink, have a chat and settle back down – an incredible film is far from over and you won’t have to miss a minute.
Barry Lyndon is just the right length: especially since it justifies the decadence of a break in the middle.
Daniel Nolan, Layout and Copy Sub Editor
Spartacus (1960)
Spartacus is, by any definition, an epic, spanning time and territory, love and war, action and adventure. The 1960 cinema release was 197 minutes long and it earns its length, following the gripping, gruelling rise and fall of Spartacus, the real-life leader of a slave revolt against the Roman Republic in 73 BC.
Directed by 30-year-old Stanley Kubrick from a screenplay by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, it stars Kirk Douglas as the gladiator who builds a slave army that marches on Rome to a fateful showdown with General Crassus, played with sneering relish by Laurence Olivier. Filmed in lush Technicolor and 70mm Technirama, with an aching soundtrack by Alex North, it drips with a raw sensuality.
I’ve seen it four times, most recently when I foisted it on my two children. Alas, my nine-year-old, who is obsessed with the equally extended Titanic, dozed off with about half an hour to go.
Leo Cendrowicz, Brussels Correspondent
No Direction Home (2005)
This biopic of Dylan covers 1961 to 1966 and from the moment Robert Zimmerman arrived in Greenwich Village to becoming an icon of the 60s protest movement – and promptly withdrawing from it – every scene fascinates. The outcry from the acoustic brigade when Dylan was called a ‘Judas’ for switching to electric or when he is asked by a reporter to “suck his glasses” are all featured as Scorsese interweaves snippets from Don’t Look Back and concert footage for the ultimate rock documentary. At three hours and 28 minutes, No Direction Home never quite gets to grips with the musical enigma of its subject but, like the ‘Stone’ of the song from which the title comes, acolytes and non-Dylan fans wish the cameras had kept on rolling.
Matt Sinha, Digital Sub Editor
The Irishman (2019)
There are only two types of anything. And that applies to long films. Most are boring. But some are captivating. Scorsese’s The Irishman lasted three hours and 29 minutes, but there wasn’t a dull moment. At 15 hours and 24 minutes, German masterpiece Heimat needed serialisation. But it would have been a crime to shorten it. The best film in the past 10 years, Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing, clocks in at a fairly hefty two hours and 36 minutes, but the time flies by – the mark of a fantastic film-maker.
Michael Day, Chief Foreign Commentator
Seven Samurai (1954)
Seven Samurai is a masterful examination of themes of sacrifice, community and humanity. With so much to unpack, the three-hour, 27-minute run-time is absolutely necessary. Both a creative and technical masterpiece, it has set the archetype of every action movie that has come after it and is the go-to guide on how to make action movies successfully.
The exposition can seem arduous at times but, if you remain patient with all the effort that goes into setting up the story, the final hour will prove to be rewarding with these beautifully-composed action sequences. For a great director like Akira Kurosawa, the long run comes to be an endless canvas to showcase more of the brilliance he has to offer. As the saying goes, good things come to those who wait.
Vinny Sandhu, Audience Executive
Schindler’s List (1993)
Steven Spielberg’s epic drama, recounting Oskar Schindler’s perilous mission to save the lives of more than 1,000 Jewish people during the Second World War, comes in at a hefty three hours and 15 minutes, but anything less would have diminished its arresting power. Each minute of Schindler’s List drags you deeper into the horror of the Holocaust, so that when you eventually emerge, squinting, into the brightness of the modern day, you cannot just turn off the TV and forget. The long minutes spent on moments like the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto insist that you really grasp what happened, and it is this – with the haunting score and masterful acting – that gives the film its lasting impact.
Emma Morgan, Live Blogs Reporter
Aliens (Director’s Cut) (1986)
This is actually two and a half hours long, but a strong case was made for its inclusion
Certainly no action movie should last beyond the hour and a half mark. Action films are by their very nature about the action and less about the storyline. I don’t care about the characters’ feelings or their backstories. But there is one exception – the 1986 classic, Aliens. James Cameron’s continuation of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece, Alien, is possibly a rare example of the sequel being better than the original. The two directors are perhaps the worst culprits for this new plague of hours-long, never-ending films. Indeed, Cameron is said to be making a torturous six-hour follow up to his oversized smurf films, Avatar. But his director’s cut of Aliens, released in 1990, is the one exception to my rule. At two hours 34 minutes, it is short to modern day standards, but back then it was seen as insanely long for an action movie. And I love every single moment of it.
Richard Vaughan, Chief Political Correspondent