This story was originally published in 2016 and has been updated to include more movies.
There’s something to be said for movies that get in and out in under 90 minutes, but there’s also a distinct pleasure in watching those movies whose running times sprawl beyond three hours — especially if you happen to, say, be quarantined at home for extended periods of time. Some of these long movies inflate the familiar three-act structure to epic proportions, while others use their expanded lengths to stretch out and wander into unexpected places. We wouldn’t necessarily suggest marathoning these films back to back, but watching them one at a time is an experience worth clearing your schedule for.
The below movies are listed by length, starting with the shortest (exactly three hours long) and ending with the longest.
Blue Is the Warmest Color
Year: 2013
Running time: 3 hours
Director: Abdellatif Kechiche
The first film to be awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes for both its director and lead actresses, this engrossing coming-of-age story follows young Adèle (newcomer Adèle Exarchopoulos) as she discovers untapped sexual desire with a blue-haired art student (Léa Seydoux). Bathed in controversy for its graphic lesbian sex scenes and the actresses’ subsequent complaints of horrid working conditions under director Abdellatif Kechiche, the film is nonetheless remarkable for realism that unfolds in unhurried but always-fascinating fashion and for the fact that after 179 minutes, you find yourself still wanting to know more.
Inland Empire
Year: 2006
Running time: 3 hours
Director: David Lynch
David Lynch’s inaugural foray into digital video, Inland Empire is three hours long and weird even by the master’s standards, especially following the (relative) mainstream success of Mulholland Drive. (Which, to be fare, is hardly Forrest Gump.) Come for the virtuoso performance by Laura Dern and the typical Lynchian draws, and stay for the possibility that you could be the viewer who finally unlocks what this film is actually about.
Oppenheimer
Year: 2023
Running time: 3 hours
Director: Christopher Nolan
The crazy thing about Oppenheimer is that at times it feels like it could easily have been longer: Christopher Nolan has packed so much detail into his film about the life of the so-called “Father of the Atomic Bomb†that its pace is relentless, even frantic at times. Of course, Nolan is a master of keeping his audience engaged: He embeds a series of mysteries and climaxes into the story so that even though this history is well-documented, we’re still eagerly anticipating what will happen next. Add to that a fantastic cast of well-known names and faces doing career-best work (Cillian Murphy! Robert Downey Jr.! Matt Damon! Josh Hartnett! David Krumholtz!), and it’s not hard to see why Oppenheimer was such a massive hit. Though probably nobody saw this film making nearly a billion dollars.
The Wolf of Wall Street
Year: 2013
Running time: 3 hours
Director: Martin Scorsese
This tale of real-life gonzo stockbroker, Jordan Belfort features Leonardo DiCaprio literally having sex on piles of money, and living on a rotating regime of Quaaludes, Adderall, Xanax, pot, cocaine, and morphine. It’s also got Jonah Hill wearing false teeth as a scene-chewing sidekick, a chest-beating turn from Matthew McConaughey, and Margot Robbie as Belfort’s sexpot second wife, whose voice could herd cats. Whether you find it an insipid “orgy of immorality†or an example of “mainlining cinema for three hours,†you won’t be bored.
Silence
Year: 2016
Running time: 3 hours, 1 minute
Director: Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese was trying to make this adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s novel of Portuguese missionaries in medieval Japan for several decades, and it’s not hard to see why. Scorsese is a Catholic, but one who is fascinated with the silence of God. He’s made movies about seemingly ordinary men learning to embrace their holiness in Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun; now, he makes a movie about a supposed holy man (a zealous Portuguese priest played by Andrew Garfield, giving his greatest performance) who has to learn to embrace his ordinariness. Only by allowing himself to be debased can this man actually come to understand God. Because holiness, it turns out, is not about elevation and superiority. It’s about groveling, shame, humiliation, pain, being brought to your lowest point. Scorsese, cinema’s great poet of suffering, understands this on a profound level. Silence is one of his greatest films.
Avengers: Endgame
Year: 2019
Running time: 3 hours 2 minutes
Directors: Anthony Russo and Joe Russo
How do you wrap up a 20-plus installment superhero saga that climaxed with the instantaneous disappearance of half the living beings in the universe? With a 182-minute “time heist†through the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, of course. Like a chill senior’s valedictory address, Endgame mixes good-humored winks with a misty-eyed reverence for everything that’s come before while never wearing out its welcome. It’s a fitting send-off to the characters who, for better or worse, defined the decade in studio cinema.
The Deer Hunter
Year: 1978
Running time: 3 hours 3 minutes
Director: Michael Cimino
Michael Cimino’s Vietnam War masterpiece boasts landmark performances from three of Hollywood’s most notable performers of the past half-century — Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and Meryl Streep — as well as the final role of John Cazale, who had one of the most unfortunately abbreviated acting careers we’ve ever seen. At 183 minutes and with a level of intensity that, on a scale of one-to-ten, ranks somewhere in the triple digits, the movie is not what you’d call easygoing, but you’ll certainly end up with a new appreciation for the possibilities of roulette, not to mention the toll of ’Nam.
The Delinquents
Year: 2023
Running time: 3 hours, 3 minutes.
Director: Rodrigo Moreno
Rodrigo Moreno’s heist comedy starts with a man robbing the bank where he works and then roping a co-worker into his devious plan to get away with it: He will confess to the crime and go to prison for several years, while his colleague will hide the money. Afterward, the two will never have to work again. That’s a delightful set-up, but Moreno’s aims are decidedly offbeat. The Delinquents is a movie about how each man changes with the promise of a life away from the rat race, a life free of obligation and soul-crushing routine. And so, the film drifts along with the pleasant cadence of a dream. The movie’s absurd length becomes part and parcel of this idea.
The Leopard
Year: 1963
Running time: 3 hours, 5, minutes
Director: Luchino Visconti
The legendary Italian director Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece stars Burt Lancaster as a 19th-century Sicilian prince who sees that his way of life is passing. Alain Delon plays his excitable, passionate nephew, and the luminous Claudia Cardinale the daughter of a local bureaucrat whose romance with Delon becomes the vessel by which the Prince’s family will maintain its power in the future. The film, based on an acclaimed novel by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, takes place during the years of Italy’s unification movement, and it’s the rare movie that can truly be called a historical epic — which is to say, it shows an actual historical process as it’s occurring and demonstrates how it affected the people who lived at that time. An enormous hit in Italy and the winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Visconti’s film was released in a poorly dubbed, hacked-to-bits version in the U.S., where it failed critically and financially. A restored cut in the 1980s restored its reputation. Today, it’s rightly judged as one of the greatest films of all time.
Judgment at Nuremberg
Year: 1961
Running time: 3 hours 6 minutes
Director: Stanley Kramer
Spencer Tracy leads an all-star cast in this dramatization of the post-war trials of Nazi judges for crimes against humanity. In 186 minutes, it’s a gripping exploration of how seemingly good people can convince themselves to do the work of totalitarian regimes.
Tess
Year: 1979
Running time: 3 hours 6 minutes
Director: Roman Polanski
An adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which you possibly read in high school, Roman Polanski’s film is dedicated to his late wife Sharon Tate — who was murdered by the Manson Family — which makes it a predictably heavy affair*. It’s also a beautiful one, and, at 186 minutes, is one of the few movies based on Victorian literature that truly feels novelistic.
RRR
Year: 2022
Running time: 3 hours 7 minutes
Director: S.S. Rajamouli
If you need to take a break sometime during this 182-minute Telugu-language epic, there’s an intermission handily built in right in the middle. But why would you want to step away from something so bent on delivering nonstop entertainment? S.S. Rajamouli’s film, which is set in the 1920s during the British Raj, imagines two real Indian freedom fighters meeting up, becoming friends, and slaughtering dozens of evil British colonialists. It’s an action movie, sure, with spectacularly over-the-top set pieces involving fire, angry crowds, and computer-generated tigers that put Hollywood superhero movies to shame. But over the course of its generous running time, RRR also veers into melodrama, comedy, light romance, suspense, and — of course — a song-and-dance number.
Short Cuts
Year: 1993
Running time: 3 hours 7 minutes
Director: Robert Altman
This isn’t Robert Altman’s first anthology movie, but it might be his best. It’s an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short stories and poems, interweaving nine stories and 22 characters in Los Angeles, careening together through a series of accidents. Tim Robbins’s philandering motorcycle cop, Lyle Lovett’s angry baker, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s phone-sex operator are all disconnected from other people but connected to each other in a kind of longing for connection. You could spend hours more just trying to understand what it all means.
Magnolia
Year: 1999
Running time: 3 hours 8 minutes
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Almost a companion piece to Altman’s Short Cuts, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 collection of interlocking stories in Los Angeles has an urgent longing; these are stories of people who are trying their best, failing, and begging for forgiveness. So much is packed into what, in the end, feels like so little time: Tom Cruise at his megalomaniacal best as a TV evangelist; a full collection of Anderson regulars — Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman — reaching out and breaking down with abandon; that amazing Aimee Mann soundtrack; an ending that has to be seen to be believed. Watch and prepare to be awed.
Babylon
Year: 2022
Running time: 3 hours 9 minutes
Director: Damien Chazelle
Sprawling, messy, ambitious, and absurd, Damien Chazelle’s three-hour-nine-minute ode to the beginnings of the Golden Age of Hollywood is too grand in its aims not to be endearing. As a force-of-nature newcomer vying for a big-screen break, Margot Robbie is all frantic energy, while Brad Pitt deploys his star wattage to great effect playing a famous leading man just cresting the peak of his career and starting on the way down. But it’s Diego Calva as a resourceful assistant who provides Babylon with its battered soul, clambering his way up while the other characters get torn apart by the relentless churn of the industry yet still as hopelessly in love with the movies as he is with the starlet he tries to save.
Gandhi
Year: 1982
Running time: 3 hours 11 minutes
Director: Richard Attenborough
An epic biopic in the youth-to-death mode, Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi is still one of the best entries in the genre that’s today easily dismissed as “Oscar bait.†Ben Kingsley’s performance rightly made him a star, and there’s real power in the film’s depiction of the nonviolence movement.
Avatar: The Way of Water
Year: 2022
Running time: 3 hours 12 minutes
Director: James Cameron
James Cameron has given everyone blanket permission to take a pee break at any time during his three-hour-12-minute sequel, but if you’re looking for a specific window, the extended Pandoran whale-hunting sequence in the middle is your best bet. Not that it or any part of The Way of Water is boring — the movie is a spectacle in the purest sense, catching up with the Na’vi-fied Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), his mate, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and their four children and following them as they flee from their home in the forest to seek sanctuary from the reinvading humans in a stunning island community. More than the first film, the second Avatar seeks to immerse you in its alien world, less an act of storytelling than a work of extraterrestrial tourism.
Nixon
Year: 1995
Running time: 3 hours, 12 minutes
Director: Oliver Stone
Oliver Stone was at the height of his power and fame when he made this biopic about America’s once-most-notorious president. But anyone who expected Noted Lefty Stone to turn his Nixon movie into a three-hour diatribe against Tricky Dick hadn’t been paying attention: Stone had been raised in a conservative household with a Republican father, and it’s clear that he understood Nixon and his resentments on a profound level. In that sense, Nixon might actually be Stone’s most personal film. That’s not to say this is a hagiography either. Indeed, Stone shoots Nixon’s White House like a haunted mansion in a horror film, all dark shadows and thunderstruck skies. The director brings all his skill as a popular entertainer to the story, which flashes back from Watergate to take in the scope of Nixon’s whole life, and Anthony Hopkins matches the filmmaker’s verve with a blustery, full-blooded performance that makes fine use of the actor’s theatrical skills.
The Right Stuff
Year: 1983
Running time: 3 hours 13 minutes
Director: Philip Kaufman
Years before Bonfire of the Vanities flopped, Hollywood had a much better time adapting Tom Wolfe, turning his nonfiction book about the Mercury program into a clear-eyed piece of Americana. As the test pilots who became the faces of the Space Race, Sam Shepard, Ed Harris, and Scott Glenn are perfectly laconic heroes, and the flying scenes are out of this world.
Kingdom of Heaven (Director’s Cut)
Year: 2005
Running time: 3 hours, 14 minutes
Director: Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott’s star-studded 2005 Crusades epic was supposed to be his triumphant follow-up to the Best Picture–winning Gladiator, but it fizzled at the box office upon release. And deservedly so: It was a tepid historical pageant with a not-very-charismatic Orlando Bloom at its center as a young French blacksmith who winds up defending Jerusalem. But that was the theatrical cut, clocking in at 145 minutes. Scott’s director’s cut, released on home video and running 194 minutes, is somehow a completely different movie: More nuanced historically and emotionally, with a wider scope of characterization, it might actually be a masterpiece. Is there a movie that has had a greater turnaround in quality between a theatrical and a director’s cut?
Titanic
Year: 1997
Running time: 3 hours 14 minutes
Director: James Cameron
James Cameron’s epic disaster-romance about the doomed ocean liner was the biggest movie ever made for its day: Theaters were packed with teenage girls who’d come out to see it for the 17th time and the lavish spectacle, not to mention Jack and Rose’s steamy first love, was worth every penny. Two decades later, parts of the film may seem cheesy or overwrought (especially the soaring Celine Dion ballads), but goddamn it if you won’t be entertained and even shed a tear when the fiddler literally goes down with the ship.
Schindler’s List
Year: 1993
Running time: 3 hours 15 minutes
Director: Stephen Spielberg
If you don’t cry watching Stephen Spielberg’s most personal and devastating movie, you may just be made of stone. The bold choice to shoot in black and white fits the somberness of the mission: To present, in unflinching terms, the devastation of the Holocaust, the brutality of the Nazi regime (as embodied in a terrifying Ralph Fiennes, in his first major role), and the work of one uneasy hero, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), who built a factory employing Polish-Jews as a way to capitalize off the war and, in the process, saved over a thousand lives, keeping those workers on his payroll long after there was any monetary reason to do so. May that John Williams score haunt you in your sleep.
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Year: 1963
Running time: 3 hours 17 minutes (Criterion Collection version), 2 hours 39 minutes (theatrical-release version)
Director: Stanley Kramer
One of the classic American comedies, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is also a long, long, long, long movie — particularly for a comedy; it’s 197-minute-long Criterion version is a doozy. But it’s worth it to see the full vision of Stanley Kramer, which encompassed the many ways in which we can be driven mad in pursuit of a large sum of money. Your favorite ensemble comedy probably owes an unseemly debt to this film: See it and appreciate both even more.
Spartacus
Year: 1960
Running time: 3 hours 17 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Spartacus is a bunch of movies at once: a rousing sword-and-sandals epic, a civil-rights analogy, and the least Kubrick-y movie Kubrick ever made. Watching it is the cinematic equivalent of eating oysters and snails.
Malcolm X
Year: 1992
Running time: 3 hours 20 minutes
Director: Spike Lee
There may be no more natural subject for the great filmmaker Spike Lee than Malcolm X, and there’s certainly no better muse than Denzel Washington; their meeting in Lee’s 202-minute adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X is pure dynamite. Watch Malcolm X and you’ll be impressed that it only took Lee this long to cover the life of such a dynamic figure; Malcolm’s life certainly stymied plenty of writers, including such lions as James Baldwin, before Lee managed to wrangle it onscreen.
Reds
Year: 1981
Running time: 3 hours 20 minutes
Director: Warren Beatty
In the long list of films that probably couldn’t get made today, Reds — a big-budget epic about the love lives of communist intellectuals — is way up there. Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton play the titular socialists and Jack Nicholson shows up to play Eugene O’Neill (offering an unintentional preview of Something’s Gotta Give). Beatty, who also directed the film, is in the swan song of his hotness here.
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Year: 2003
Running time: 3 hours 21 minutes
Director: Peter Jackson
Okay, so maybe the third installation of Peter Jackson’s remarkable adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy is the longest because it has three more endings than necessary; it’s still well deserving of being the first and only fantasy film to win Best Picture. The stakes are higher, the special effects more spectacular; you can really feel the fate of Middle Earth on the line as Frodo (Elijah Wood) battles a giant spider, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) leads a coalition of elves and dwarves and humans to defend Minas Tirith, and our breakfast-loving hobbits, trailed by Gollum, brave death to return the ring to Mount Doom. Gandalf would be so proud.
The Godfather, Part II
Year: 1974
Running time: 3 hours 22 minutes
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Not only is The Godfather, Part II the rare sequel that’s better than the original, it also holds the distinction of being longer, as well. (A less prestigious feat, sure.) Francis Ford Coppola makes the extra running time count: Part II is only 25 minutes longer than the first installment, but it expands the scope considerably, detailing the criminal rise of Vito Corleone and the spiritual fall of his son. Plus it features cinema’s least-happy kiss.
Barry Lyndon
Year: 1974
Running time: 3 hours 23 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
While Stanley Kubrick was never shy about letting his movies breathe, Barry Lyndon has the honor of being his longest work: At 203 minutes, it’s longer than both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Eyes Wide Shut. But like all Kubrick movies, it’s sumptuous and virtuosic, and the added length allows Kubrick to sink even deeper into the detail and totality of vision that characterize his work. The story of an Irish adventurer’s social rise in the 18th century, Barry Lyndon doesn’t have the wide appeal of Dr. Strangelove or A Clockwork Orange, but for the patient viewer, its rewards are just as rich.
Gone With the Wind
Year: 1939
Running time: 3 hours 24 minutes
Director: Victor Fleming
You may cringe with the outdated attitudes toward race in this epic romance, which, adjusted for inflation, still has the biggest box-office intake of all time, but boy, does the story still hold up. Come for the Technicolor journey through the antebellum South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, and stay for the tempestuous relationship between bullheaded Scarlett O’Hara (the magnificent Vivien Leigh) and dashing rogue Rhett Butler (Clark Gable). And remember that Hattie McDaniel was the first African American actor to win an Oscar, and think how far — or not so far — we’ve come*.
Andrei Rublev
Year: 1966
Running time: 3 hours 25 minutes
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Tarkovsky is arguably the patron saint of long films, and at 205 minutes, Andrei Rublev — his reflection on medieval Russia and the role of the Christian artist — is his longest film. Tarkovsky is the director’s director, and while Andrei Rublev might not sound like the most accessible iTunes rental for your average Friday night, it might just make you smarter.
JFK
Year: 1991
Running time: 3 hours 26 minutes
Director: Oliver Stone
Oliver Stone’s Nixon was also long enough to make this list, but the director’s thriller about the assassination of John F. Kennedy is, frankly, the film you will remember when you’re old and gray. This movie, which follows the dogged attempts of former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) as he attempts to discover the conspiracy he’s convinced killed the president, is the reason why you know of the Warren Report, and at the time of its release spawned — or simply released from the shadows — an industry of rabid theory-mongering and distrust in government agencies that has a direct line to 9/11 conspiracy theorists and even the rise of Donald Trump. Debunked or not, it’s a must-watch.
Killers of the Flower Moon
Year: 2023
Running time: 3 hours, 26 minutes
Director: Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese has become notorious in recent years for taking his time with his films — with the 181-minute Silence, the 209-minute Irishman, and now, the 206-minute Killers of the Flower Moon, each title igniting a whole new wave of discourse about Long Movies. Indeed, one of the elements that has defined Scorsese’s later work is the patience with which he tells these stories. The director has always reveled in making us feel uncomfortable through his explorations of extreme psychology, but now he lets us live longer in these people’s heads, prompting us to reflect on them even more. In the past, Scorsese’s frenetic pacing and constant stylization could distract us from the depravity of his characters, at least a little bit. Now, there’s no escape. And in Killers of the Flower Moon, which follows the marriage at the heart of the Osage Murders of the 1920s, the director’s approach finds its most searing iteration. As we watch the course of Ernest and Mollie Burkhart’s relationship develop, we see a troubling metaphor for the colonization and genocide of America’s Indigenous peoples.
Lawrence of Arabia
Year: 1962
Running time: 3 hours 47 minutes
Director: David Lean
Sure, your butt might hurt after sitting through all of David Lean’s 226-minute widescreen epic. But the trick is not minding that it hurts.
Once Upon a Time in America
Year: 1984
Running time: 3 hours 49 minutes (European cut), 2 hours 19 minutes (U.S. release)
Director: Sergio Leone
Length: It doesn’t make it easy. Sergio Leone’s gangster opus spanned 229 minutes in its original European cut — the director initially wanted to release it in two three-hour parts — then got reduced to 139 minutes by its American distributors with the predictable effects of arbitrarily disemboweling 90 minutes of a film. The reduced release flopped; the original is one of the spaghetti-western auteur’s masterworks, an epic of the American dream.
Cleopatra
Year: 1963
Running time: 3 hours 53 minutes
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
The sets! The stars! The story! Everything about the 192-minute Cleopatra is larger than life — including the budget, which was the highest ever for a film at the time. The movie itself has a mixed reputation — the three-hour version was heavily cut for time, and fans say the longer versions are much better — but it’s worth watching as a time capsule of the scale and scope of classical Hollywood cinema before it disappeared forever.
Nymphomaniac
Year: 2013
Running time: 4 hours 1 minute (both volumes combined)
Director: Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier’s dedicated exploration of sexual depravity was released as two separate movies. But while the separate parts do have some differences — part one focuses on Stacy Martin’s Young Joe and is slightly less dark, while part two concentrates on Charlotte Gainsbourg’s older Joe and is, uh, really dark — they really do make one large, disturbing whole and, in that way, are consummate von Trier. To be fair, only part one features a rampaging Uma Thurman, but you should still watch both.
Hamlet
Year: 1996
Running time: 4 hours 2 minutes
Director: Kenneth Branagh
What’s that, Mel Gibson and Laurence Olivier? You decided to cut Hamlet, the greatest drama in the English language, in order to make it “shorter,†“more cinematic,†and “not four hours long� Kenneth Branagh has no time for your mess. When Kenneth Branagh films Hamlet, he’s going to film all of it. Not only that, he’s also going to shoot it in 70-mm., fill the screen with an orgy of visual splendor, and bring in super-famous people like Robin Williams to play even the smallest parts. Whether you prefer this version to its predecessors … well, that is the question.
Until the End of the World
Year: 1991
Running time: 4 hours, 47 minutes
Director: Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders’s 1991 portrait of the near-future (which is of course now the past) follows a rudderless party girl (Solveig Dommartin) who becomes obsessed with a mysterious wanderer (William Hurt). It turns out he’s traveling the world with a device to record videos that will allow his blind mother (Jeanne Moreau) to finally see. It’s the road movie to end all road movies, with a soundtrack featuring original songs by everyone from Nick Cave to U2 to R.E.M. to Neneh Cherry to Talking Heads. While editing, Wenders realized that there was no way his original vision of the film, clocking in at nearly five hours, would be released, so he saved all his materials; the craze around director’s cuts hadn’t begun yet, but he suspected that one day he’d be allowed to finish the picture properly. The 158-minute version initially released in the U.S. was fragmented and confusing, albeit with glimpses of the prophetic, sprawling epic the film could become. Eventually, Wenders restored the movie to its proper length and began traveling the world with it. Today, it’s available on the Criterion Collection — all 287 gloriously prophetic minutes of it.
1900
Year: 1977
Running time: 5 hours, 17 minutes
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
After the runaway success of Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci decided to spend all his clout on one of the most brazenly ambitious films ever made: A 5-plus hour epic about the working class struggle in Italy in the first half of the 20th century, financed by Hollywood and with an international cast of stars, including Robert De Niro, Donald Sutherland, Gérard Depardieu, Burt Lancaster, Sterling Hayden, and Dominique Sanda. The result was a lyrical, harrowing, incendiary, red-flag-waving melodrama. Naturally, Hollywood was mortified. Postproduction battles resulted in a 4-hour U.S. version, but the film was later restored to its 5-hour, 17-minute version, which is often shown in two parts.
Fanny and Alexander
Year: 1982
Running time: 5 hours 42 minutes (original); 3 hours 17 minutes (abridged)
Director: Ingmar Bergman
You know a movie’s long when even the short version tops three hours. Ingmar Bergman’s epic about two siblings in the early 20th century comprises 312 minutes in its original, four-part TV version; the abridged film comes in at 188 minutes. Both are highlights of the Swedish master, but it’s worth seeking out the complete item. After all, if you think about it like a TV series, 312 minutes is a bargain — that’s like one episode of Game of Thrones.
Best of Youth
Year: 2003
Running time: 6 hours 22 minutes (television version), 6 hours 6 minutes (theatrical-release version)
Director: Marco Tullio Giordana
Like Fanny and Alexander, Best of Youth was originally envisioned as a four-part miniseries, then received a shorter theatrical cut. Covering nearly 40 years in the life of a single family, the two-part, 366-minute version is one of the high points of expansive Italian cinema; if you’ve recently hoovered up the complete works of Elena Ferrante, this is just what the doctor ordered, though the doctor might not suggest tackling it all at once.
Sátántangó
Year: 1994
Running time: 7 hours 30 minutes
Director: Béla Tarr
There are long movies, and then there’s Sátántangó, Bela Tarr’s legendary seven-hour adaptation of the novel of the same name by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai. Unlike Fanny and Alexander, Best of Youth, or Dekalog, Sátántangó was always envisioned as one film, which should give you some idea of Tarr’s style: meditative, accumulative, uncompromising. Tarr matched the length of his film with the length of his takes, which often reach ten minutes without interruption. Sátántangó isn’t an easy sit, but Susan Sontag once said she’d be glad to watch it every year of her life.
Dekalog
Year: 1989
Running time: 9 hours 21 minutes
Director: Krzysztof Kieślowski
Rereleased by the Criterion Collection, Dekalog is the ten-part triumph of the great Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski, best known for his Three Colors trilogy. As if those three films weren’t enough, Dekalog basically represents ten more masterworks, each based on one of the Ten Commandments. While they were originally made for television, the parts of Dekalog certainly feel cinematic in nature; whether you consider them TV or film, which is becoming an increasingly less-meaningful description, they are all unapologetically art.
Shoah
Year: 1985
Running time: 9 hours 26 minutes
Director: Claude Lanzmann
For multiple reasons, Shoah is probably the hardest film on this list to sit through. Claude Lanzmann’s acclaimed documentary consists of nine hours of interviews with those who survived, lived beside, or worked in Hitler’s death camps — an unsparing look at the human face of the Holocaust.
Out 1
Year: 1971
Running time: 12 hours 53 minutes
Directors: Jacques Rivette and Suzanne Schiffman
At almost 13 hours long, Jacques Rivette and Suzanne Schiffman’s opus was never intended to be seen all at once. Instead, Rivette thought it’d make the most sense to show the film — which is divided up into eight feature-length chunks — over the course of a leisurely two days. However you might choose to partake, Out 1 is a singular experience that demands its audience surrender to its sprawl and to its pace, kicking off with long sequences of experimental theater exercises and seemingly unconnected characters involved in petty grifts. The plot, when it arrives, involves a secret society and some artistic dramas, but the point is something grander and more ambiguous, a feeling of disillusionment and loss in the wake of the tumultuous idealism of the ’60s.