Movies: Best of the Longest

Est Picture Winner

Last week the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced its Best Picture nominees for 2025.

Only one came in at 120 minutes—the length that many have come to regard as the ideal length for a feature film. (Although a recent poll conducted by Talker Research says the majority favors 92 minutes.)

For the record, here are this year’s Oscar Nominees, from shortest to longest.

• Conclave:  2 hours.
• Emilia Pérez: 2 hours, 12 minutes.
• I’m Still Here: 2 hours, 15 minutes.
• Anora: 2 hours, 19 minutes.
• Nickel Boys: 2 hours, 20 minutes.
• A Complete Unknown: 2 hours, 21 minutes.
• The Substance: 2 hours, 21 minutes.
• Wicked: 2 hours, 40 minutes
• Dune: Part II: 2 hours, 46 minutes
• The Brutalist: 3 hours, 35 minutes + 15 minute intermission.

Clearly, The Brutalist is the runaway winner—at least in terms of length. It’s also the odds-on favorite to walk away with a golden statue, according to Gold Derby, Screen Rant, and others.

How Did We Get Here?

Last night, while reading Greg Kulon’s new biography of special effects wizard Willis O’Brien (the man who gave us the giant beasts of the original Lost World and King Kong) I came across this interesting bit of movie history:

One of the earliest battles in the development of the industry involved the distribution system and how filmmakers would be paid for the films they developed. In this case, the film distributors and theatre owners wanted to keep their costs as low as possible to bring the largest possible audience into their theatres. Their vision was that they would rent or buy the films from the filmmakers at a fixed price per foot of film.

As a result, the 1,000-foot reel (holding approximately 15 minutes of film) became the standard length for narrative cinema in the first decade of the 20th century.  

But even then, things were changing.

In 1906, Australian filmmaker Charles Tait released the Story of the Kelly Gang (approximately 60 minutes).

More long-form movies followed, including the Vitagraph Company of America’s adaptation of Les Misérables (1909), and the Italian features L’Inferno (1911) and Quo Vadis (1913).

People’s Choice

I concluded my previous post by asking folks to recommend their favorite long films.

Responses came from an august group of writers, reviewers, and cinephiles. Among them:

Steve Balshaw (head programmer at the GrimmFest Film Festival) recommends Heaven’s Gate, Once Upon a Time in America, and Nixon “just to cite three that never get sufficient love.”

Benjamin Kurt Unsworth (short-story writer and film reviewer at Phantasmagoria and We Belong Dead) recommends  JFK, Spartacus, and The Green Mile. I haven’t seen the latter since it came out, but Benjamin assures me that it “flies by.”

Filling out the list, Brian De Castro (contributor to Deep Red Magazine’s The Horror! The Horror!), recommends The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly; Ryan Howse (author of Red in Tooth and Claw) recommends The Seven Samurai; and Barton Paul Levenson recommends The Lord of the Rings movies.

Taken together, the titles could fill two solid days of binge-watching. You could watch them all straight through in the time it would take to sit through The Clock and Empire (see my previous post for more about those).

Here’s the list, from longest to shortest. (If a title is available in various cuts, I have opted for the extended version):

• The Return of the King (4 hours, 23 minutes)
• Once Upon a Time in America (3 hours, 49 minutes)
• The Two Towers (3 hours, 43 minutes)
• Heaven’s Gate (3 hours, 36 minutes)
• The Fellowship of the Ring (3 hours, 28 minutes)
• Seven Samurai (3 hours, 28 minutes)
• JFK (3 hours, 26 minutes),
• Spartacus (3 hours, 17 minutes)
• Nixon (3 hours, 12 minutes)
• The Green Mile (3 hours, 9 minutes)
• The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (2 hours, 58 minutes)

But wait! There’s more!

Filmmaker Nicholas Schwartz (co-host of the Horror Drafts podcasts) sends word of an extended version of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining that screened before the film went into wide release.

Running two hours and 26 minutes, the uncut version included a two-minute epilogue (pictured above) in which the manager of the Overlook Hotel visits Wendy and Danny in the hospital.

Kubrick removed that ending from the film after opening week, and it hasn’t been seen since.

Nevertheless, if you’re interested in rounding out the list above with a two-hour, 22-minute cut of Kubrick’s film, there is a two-disk special edition available in 4K.

For more about The Shining, check out Nick’s posts on Instagram.

What do you think?

Are we missing your favorite long-form movie?

You don’t need to be a film reviewer, festival curator, or published author to chime in.

The comment box is open, as are the social media links at the bottom of this page. Send a recommendation, and maybe we’ll revisit this topic in a future post.

For now, I’ve got some movies to watch.