THE FILM LIST
The tricolour climax of Abel Gance’s 429 minutes Napoleon (1927), playing in 2024
1. LONG FILMS
In a week in which some have queried whether a tight 90 minutes is the way to getting people back into cinema, we say NO. Films have, on average, stayed the same length since around 1960 - what has changed, however, is that audiences increasingly prefer longer films, which is why there are so many films that run over 2h40m in the box five top ten every year, let alone the Sight And Sound top fifty.
One of the great long films is Akira Kurosawa’s 207 min Seven Samurai. That’s half an hour per Samurai.
It may be long, but it is no slow cinema - Kurosawa’s epic feels every bit the modern action picture.
This Film List is of ten films that are longer than Seven Samurai that are worth your time, ordered by increasing length.
There’s no denying that having seen any of these lengthy masterpieces gives one a certain bragging right - especially if it was in a cinema. To be frank, for those of us with ADHD the focus- granting magic of the theatrical experience is the only way of getting through some of these in one shot.
TEN CLOCK-BUSTING FILMS
The Irishman (Scorsese, 2019) - 209 mins. Scorsese uses duration to show how sin accumulates in a man’s soul over a lifetime, like silt. But will Irish-American gangster Frank Sheeran be able to unburden himself before the end?
La Maman et la Putain (Eustache, 1973) - 219 mins. A monumental slapdown of the leftover dregs of the post-68 Left Bank scene, Eustache lets us hang out with Paris’s worst people at great length, just so we can really feel how tiresome they are. Enormously funny, if you’re on its wavelength.
A Brighter Summer Day (Yang, 1991) - 237 mins. In this elegiac crime drama, Yang uses cinematic length to capture the true restlessness of youth - giving us the greatest film of 1991. (Sorry, Terminator 2.)
Ludwig (Visconti, 1973) - 238 mins. Four hours might feel like Too Much, but this is the tale of the King of Too Much, Ludwig II. He’s the neurotic one who built Neuschwanstein, the Romanesque Revival palace upon which the Disney Castle is based. As the credit roll, you can almost hear his ghost shouting More! More!
Norte, The End of History (Diaz, 2013) - 250 mins. Actually pretty short by Diaz’s standards, this Philippine riff on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment uses its length to give everyone plenty of time to do the right thing, and to show the long arc of history, bending its way towards… well, that would be telling. The length allows Diaz to boil his characters like the proverbial frogs, or for them to look around and think, David Byrne style, “well, how did I get here?”
Nymphomaniac (Von Trier, 2014) - 325 mins. If Gen-Z is right, and sex scenes fail to move to the plot forward, it makes a kind of sense that Nymphomaniac would end up being this long. They’re not right, but that’s a story for another day. In the meantime, Von Trier’s movie about sex and provocation has a provocative length. Well, of course it has.
Napoleon (Gance, 1927) - 429 mins. There’s nothing in cinema quite like seeing the three-screen tricolor climax playing out in a cinema, and the seven hour wait only makes it all the better.
Sátántangó (Tarr, 1994) - 432 mins. Tarr’s adaptation of László Krasznahorkai’s novel tells a story about stagnation, exhaustion and false hope. The seven-plus hours are used to make the audience feel every moment of decay. And if that’s not enough, someone tortures a cat to death. Personally, I prefer Tarr’s Werkmeister Harmonies - I’d recommend starting there if you’re thinking of building up to this one, monumental as it is.
Out 1 (Rivette, 1972) - 743 mins. At twelve hours and twenty three minutes, Rivette’s epic film was designed to be seen over multiple days in cinemas (for me, a weekend at London’s Close-Up Cinema). Rivette was always interested in how it was possible to get lost in a maze of semiotic meaning, where everything seemed to point to somewhere else. Here, the idea that the centre might not hold was meaningless. There probably is no centre, just an endless labyrinth of interpretation. The duration is used to ensure the audience is as lost as Jean-Pierre Léaud. This is a film Rivette would return to in 1981’s La Pont Du Nord, albeit at a trimmer 129 minutes.
La Flor (Linás, 2018) - 803 mins. La Flor unfolds as a sprawling encounter with Argentinian storytelling, in which fables mutate, abandon themselves, or restart in different forms, refusing the satisfactions of completion or hierarchy. Its six movements drift through genre, tone, and register, sometimes playful, sometimes punishing, often deliberately unresolved, with repetition, digression, and delay becoming structural principles. Meaning accumulates not through plot payoff but through time spent, fatigue felt, attention stretched, and curiosity repeatedly reignited or frustrated. At places one of the actors is visibly pregnant with the director’s child - well, it was a long shoot (ten years). We see six separate stories play out, taking in spies, curses, demigods and kidnappings. At another point the director appears at a park bench to doodle the structure of the film into a notebook and show it to us. What emerges is less a single narrative than a lived relationship with cinema itself, one that treats endurance, uncertainty, and partial engagement as essential components of spectatorship rather than obstacles to it. It really isn’t 13 hours long at all, because it’s vital to see it at the cinema, to mill around in the intervals talking about it, to make friends and argue with them, to bond over the shared psychic and ergonomic trauma, to go for lunch or sleep and then come back again. I saw this over three days at the ICA in London - perhaps the real estimate of La Flor’s length, then, is “a long weekend.”
Longer than all of these, of course, is 2010’s The Clock, which lasts for either 24 hours or infinity, depending on how you conceive of it - either way, it is a film so long that it invites you to sleep through it, an experience I wrote about here.
Until next time, remember:
Absolut Kino, always