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The 100 Best Movies 3 Hours or Longer, Ranked by Tomatometer
Suddenly finding yourself with lots of free time? In possession of a murder of minutes, a bounty of hours, a gaggle of extra days, wondering how to fill them all up? Sounds like you could go for a movie – a really loooong movie. Well, we’ve sifted through the backend of cinema history, from the silent era all the way up to the present, and collected and ranked the 100 best-reviewed movies that run three hours or longer (Certified Fresh movies listed first) to vanquish those pesky waking moments.
The director who takes the most advantage of your attention span? No surprise: It’s Martin Scorsese, with six films on this list, including 2019’s The Irishman. Other directors with multiple entries are legends known for their predilection for epic storytelling: Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai, Red Beard); David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago); Oliver Stone (JFK, Malcom X); and Stanley Kubrick (Spartacus, Barry Lyndon). Of course, Francis Ford Coppola gets a couple in there: There’s The Godfather, Part II (though not The Godfather, which is three minutes shy of three hours), and Apocalypse Now Redux over regular ol’ vanilla Apocalypse Now, which runs a swift 2.5 hours.
Now Redux underscores an interesting point. It’s included because the film had a national theatrical release, and got its own separate Tomatometer score from the original movie. Other director’s cuts that clear the 3-hour mark, like Watchmen or Kingdom of Heaven, or extended editions like Lord of the Rings, are excluded because they don’t have their own Tomatometers, and never saw major release.
Meanwhile, Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2 were cut from the list: You had to buy two tickets, meaning two separate movies. (But Grindhouse is in because one ticket at the box office got you the whole sleazy shebang.) This Kill Bill rule applies in excluding other potential candidates like the Nymphomaniac volumes, or Steven Soderbergh’s Che: Though it screened at Cannes as a single release, in America it was split in two, requiring two purchases, making them two movies.
Then we arrive at European films like Scenes From a Marriage or The Best of Youth, which were originally presented as TV miniseries before being edited into singular entities. Those count. Again, it’s all about how the movie was packaged and exhibited for consumption in North America. And finally, we put in a minimum requirement of 10 Tomatometer-approved critic reviews and ratings for each movie to keep this guide from trending too obscure.
Are longer movies better? We wrote an article exploring the notion. Something must be keeping these filmmakers in the edit bay, piling on the celluloid. With a movie like Avengers: Endgame, the appeal of a long runtime is apparent: It’s got dozens and dozens of colorful characters eager to pummel each other, and had to wrap up a 22-movie story arc. Titanic‘s got a sinking boat. King Kong has a big ape.
But some of the other movies’ hooks aren’t as obvious. Films like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev or Bela Tarr’s Satantango use their generous runtimes to explore new dimensions in cinema, to build something mystical and mysterious within viewers, culminating close to a rapturous experience. And a few of the documentaries, such as Shoah or O.J.: Made in America (which had an awards-qualifying theatrical run), need the space to do right by their topics.
Recently, we’ve added Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Christopher Nolan’s biopic thriller Oppenheimer, Spanish-language heister The Delinquents.
With all that said, it’s time to get real comfy on that couch: Check out the 100 best movies 3 hours or longer! —Alex Vo
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