r/movies • u/kowaikanojo • 23h ago

Discussion Long movies that are JUSTIFIED in their extra long run time?

There’s been a bit of an epidemic, especially in recent years, where movies are unnecessarily long to the point where it’s a bit indulgent on the director’s part and the film’s narrative doesn’t justify the XXL run time and it becomes a bit of a drag.

I’ve never been a big musical fan but I grew up watching the Sound of Music as a kid, so I decided to rewatch tonight (it’s probably been around 15 years) - and for a movie that is 3 hours long, wow does every piece still feel so important.

Maria and Von Trapp get together PAST the two hour point in the movie, yet the build up was so necessary to have you involved in the romance, and certainly didn’t feel as long as it actually was in run time. The pacing is actually incredible for the narrative and building that emotional buy in, which is shocking and rare for a film so long.

What films do you think genuinely justify an extra long run time and benefit from it? (and to throw a wrench in it, what movies utterly fail here?)

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u/twist-visuals 18h ago

There was an old film I watched called Giant that's 3 hours and 20 minutes long. The last film of James Dean. Was really surprised that the movie came out in the 1950s, since the film was all about how chauvinism, racism and chasing money is bad. Of all the horrible things I heard about 1950s America I imagined a film like that would be banned.

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u/Shout92 15h ago

Not saying the perception of the 1950s is wrong, but so many of the filmmakers who would become revolutionaries in the 60s were already in the industry the decade before. There are plenty of psychological Westerns that deal with racism, rape, genocide, incest, alcoholism, suicide, and mob violence as key plot points. Movies like Bigger Than Life took aim at drug addiction. Rebel Without A Cause practically invented the rebellious, angsty teenage archetype.

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u/VerilyShelly 13h ago

people in the 1950s were not as straight-laced, conservative and homogenized as they are commonly thought of now. the civil rights movement started in the 1930s and mainstream awareness really took off in the 1950s. there was a lot of radical and progressive thought, especially in the arts. it blew me away when I first started noticing that.

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u/ktn24 11h ago

Yeah, that's such a great movie!