The Best Movies Over 4 Hours Long

It’s no secret that movies are getting longer these days. It seems to be an unwritten rule for many moviegoers that a film should be anywhere between 90 to 120 minutes. Much shorter, and you don't get your money's worth. Much longer, and you start getting restless. We've been trained to expect two hours.

Of course, this isn’t a complaint. As Roger Ebert once said, “No good movie is too long, and no bad movie is short enough.”

Playing devil’s advocate, I’ll counter Roger with this quote from the master of suspense.

"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder." - Alfred Hitchcock

Maybe we’ve underestimated the attention spans of modern-day audiences. The fervent binge-watching world we live in has possibly made them more willing to watch a 3-hour movie. I just hope these same audiences don’t mistake the cinema for their living rooms and take out their brightly-lit phones in the theater. Just make sure not to buy that extra-large soda beforehand.

And with that in mind, let’s focus on the films that exceed the 3-hour mark—hell, let’s focus on 4+ hour movies, the black sheep of cinema, the films that 99% of audiences would avoid at all costs. There’s already hesitation to buy a ticket to a 3-hour movie, but 4 hours? No major studio would dare release such a thing.

There’s been much debate over whether or not David Lynch’s 18-hour “Twin Peaks: The Return” should be considered a film or a TV series, with critics being split on the debate. “The Return” placed #17 on our Best Films of 2010s poll, and was named film of the Decade by Cahiers du Cinema. Jim Jarmusch is also an adamant defender, saying it was the “best American cinema of the last decade.”

Of course, it can’t really be counted here since it never got a theatrical release. They couldn’t show all 18 hours; that would have been madness. Come to think of it, does Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage” and its 5-hour cut count? It was originally a six-part television miniseries in Sweden and was trimmed down to a 2-hour 49-minute version for theaters.

Yet, it’s happened. 4+ hour movies definitely exist. In most cases, the director’s ambitions are so high that there’s no way they would dare trim their epic down.

THEATRICALLY RELEASED

“Satantango” (Bela Tarr) — 7 hr 19 min
“Happy Hour” (Ryusuke Hamaguchi) — 5 hr 17 min
“Shoah” (Claude Lanzmann) — 9 hr 26 min
“OJ: Made in America” (Ezra Edelman) — 7 hr 43 min
“Carlos” (Olivier Assayas) — 5 hr 39 min
“The Best of Youth” (Marco Tullio Giordana) — 6 hr 6min
“Che” (Steven Soderbergh) — 4 hr 28 min
“Hamlet” (Kenneth Branagh) — 4 hr 2 min

EXTENDED EDITIONS

“Heaven’s Gate” (Michael Cimino) — 4 hr.
“Once Upon A Time in America” (Sergio Leone) — 4 hr 29 min
“Fanny and Alexander” (Ingmar Bergman) —5 hr 12 min
“Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (Peter Jackson) —4 hr 23 min
“Nymphomaniac” (Lars Von Trier) —5 hr 30 min
“Das Boot” (Wolfgang Peterson) — 4 hr. 53 min
“Dances With Wolves” (Kevin Costner) — 4 hr 16 min

Researching for this piece, it seems like no major Hollywood studio has ever released a 4+ hour movie theatrically. “Gone With the Wind” (1939) came closest at 3 hours and 58 minutes (including intermission). “Cleopatra” (1963) was 3 hours and 53 minutes. That’s as close as any movie within the studio system has gotten. This only makes it more astounding how Martin Scorsese managed to convince Hollywood execs to greenlight his last two projects, “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “The Irishman,” both around 3 and a half hours.

Let’s make this a space for readers to share their favorite films that run over 240 minutes. This weekend, instead of diving into another streaming series, why not take on a 4-hour movie challenge?