90-minute movies: Classic films that prove longer is not better

This is a feeling you’ll know well. You’re about to press play on a streaming platform or you’re making a cinema date with a friend.

Then someone utters those magical words, “Oh, it’s only an hour and a half long, and that’s including the end credits scroll”. Hallelujah! All praise the 90-minute movie, an endangered species.

Look, you can’t judge the quality of a movie by how long (sometimes very, very long) it is, but there is this great sense of relief and goodwill when a filmmaker has the discipline to keep it tight. No waste, no unnecessary indulgence and, hopefully, well-paced.

Obviously there are many terrible 90-minute movies just as there are three-hour masterpieces. But at least you don’t feel as if you’ve been swindled half your day when a shorter film turns out to be a stinker.

Just this Oscars season alone, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist clocks in at three and a half hours, which includes a 15-minute intermission that is hard-coded into the video file. It’s a decades-spanning historical epic that deals with big emotions and ambitious ideas. It can be three and a half hours long.

Wicked comes in at two hours and 41 minutes, The Seed of the Sacred Fig at two hours and 47 minutes, and frontrunner and Cannes Palme d’Or winner Anora is two hours and 21 minutes.

But there are also two contenders that are far more sparing with their runtime.

September 5, a dramatisation of the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis as told through the lens of the sports broadcasters who were on the ground, is 91 minutes while A Real Pain, a drama-comedy about cousins reuniting on a Holocaust tour in Poland, is 90 minutes.

Sometimes, a movie is as long as it should be. But more often than not, too many ask for too much of the audience. Family movies that used to come in well under 90 minutes blow out to over two hours, rom-coms drag on forever, and every Avatar insists on overstaying.

Speaking of the famously irascible James Cameron, two years ago he moaned about audiences complaining movies were too long. Apparently, because we now binge-watch TV shows for eight hours at a time, Avatar being three hours long is nothing.

First, an at-home, episodic watch is a very different experience, and second, it’s not so much that both Avatar movies are too long, it’s that they’re both bad AND too long. A lethal combo.

There is only so much you can suffer of repetitive, soul-sucking wooden dialogue and no real emotional pathos from CGI blue people. For almost the same story, you could rewatch Fern Gully in 76 minutes.

But let’s turn this around. We can rag on three-hour movies for, well, three hours, but the more productive conversation is to celebrate all the wonderful movies that is a tight 90 minutes.

You could fit in two of them in the same time it took for Martin Scorsese to finally cut from that interminable Quaaludes scene in Wolf of Wall Street. Or maybe it just felt like it took up all three hours of that movie’s runtime.

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY

Runtime: 96 minutes

There’s a reason why this is venerated as one of the best, if not the actual best, rom-coms of all time. The repartee is witty, the emotional stakes are real and Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal’s chemistry is off the charts. Directed by Rob Reiner from a script by late, great Nora Ephron, the 12-year story of Harry and Sally’s eventual coming-together remains the gold standard. Men and women can be just friends, but maybe not these two.

Watch: Digital rental

DR STRANGELOVE

Runtime: 95 minutes

Stanley Kubrick’s political satire has only become more urgent since its release in 1964. At the time, the Cold War was raging, and a ludicrous stalemate between nuclear states became fodder for this dark comedy about security, bureaucracy, ego, masculinity and idiots being in charge. Its famous quote, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the war room” sums up not just the film but our world.

Watch: Digital rental

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

Runtime: 98 minutes

Noted for its sensuality, In the Mood for Love tells the story of two neighbours in 1962 Hong Kong. Both are married to other people but there is something between them, a charged, unspoken sexual chemistry that simmers in the humidity and heat of Hong Kong. Wong Kar-wai’s masterpiece is visually arresting while performances from Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung really stand up to the film’s title.

Watch: DVDs on eBay

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS

Runtime: 85 minutes

This laugh-out-loud goof from Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi would go on to spawn a six-season series but the original film is well worth your time. Set in Wellington, it follows a share house of vampires being petty, bloodthirsty and kind of inept. There’s a visit from an ancient being, a rivalry with a werewolf gang and the Unholy Masquerade party. It’s dead-set funny.

Watch: Netflix, Stan

ROPE

Runtime: 81 minutes

Rope was the first of four movies Alfred Hitchcock would make with Jimmy Stewart, an exploration of psychopathy and how an intellectual exercise can morph into murder. The story was based on a play that was inspired by real-life killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who hatched a murder just to see if they could get away with it. The suspenseful movie is played out in real time and is edited together to seem as if it was one continuous shot.

Watch: Digital rental

BEFORE SUNSET

Runtime: 80 minutes

The middle movie of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy is the only one that comes in under 90 minutes and picks up nine years after Jesse and Celeste’s night wanderings in Vienna. They both carry the experience of lives lived and the regret of choices not made, but their reunion is all the richer because of the people they’ve become. How they could fit into each other’s world’s is parsed against the backdrop of iconic Paris sights including the Coulee verte Rene-Dumont park.

Watch: Digital rental

ANCHORMAN

Runtime: 94 minutes

As rewatchable as it is silly, Anchorman is wacky humour on full tilt. It’s Will Ferrell at his peak powers as the self-aggrandising anchorman for a small TV station in San Diego. His sooky response to the hiring of a woman to share the desk is pure man-child idiocy but it’s very funny. It has meme-able moments, sex panther cologne and a supporting cast (Christina Applegate, Steve Carell, Paul Rudd and David Koechner) that’s game for anything.

Watch: Netflix, Binge, Stan

THE BABADOOK

Runtime: 94 minutes

Especially for a directorial debut, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook is working on so many different levels while making it seem effortless. The truly terrifying horror movie features Essie Davis as a widowed mother who, with her young son, is confronted by a monster inside their home. The film is scary as hell while also serving as a potent allegory for grief.

Watch: Prime, Paramount+, Shudder

WALL-E

Runtime: 97 minutes

Everyone talks always talks about the opening minutes of Up as Pixar at its most romantic but arguably, it’s actually Wall-E, about a clean-up robot left on an uninhabitable Earth to do a job that has no real point. Then Wall-E meets EVE, and he follows her across the universe. The largely dialogue-free adventure draws from silent film traditions while telling a modern story about connection, purpose and humanity. It’s very, very sweet in the best possible way.

Watch: Disney+

TRAINSPOTTING

Runtime: 93 minutes

Danny Boyle’s frenetic movie based on Irvine Welsh’s personality-fuelled novel is a favourite of many guys growing up in the 90s and thinking they’re so cool and alternative because they too have opted out of the cookie-cutter choose life ethos Rent-boy disdains. Even so, the movie rocks, an exploration of class, addiction and the power structures that have already decided on your value as a human being. So, choose life or don’t but whatever you do, don’t choose the matching luggage sets, that’s just gauche.

Watch: Foxtel, digital rental

FANTASTIC MR FOX

Runtime: 87 minutes

Most movies in Wes Anderson’s oeuvre have respectable runtimes so you could pick a bunch of others including Rushmore and The Grand Budapest. But since we are coming up on Christmas, Fantastic Mr Fox is an excellent choice for the whole family. Among the many virtues of this delightful stop-motion animation is a truly inspired marriage of voice cast and character, starting with George Clooney as the droll Mr Fox.

Watch: Disney+, Stan

THE FATHER

Runtime: 97 minutes

Anthony Hopkins’ win at the 2021 Oscars came as a great shock to everyone who thought Chadwick Boseman would posthumously pick up the gong. Unless, of course, you had actually seen The Father, and then you would’ve understood the power of Hopkins’ raw performance as a man whose perception of reality had been shaken by his dementia. It’s an incredibly moving story that is designed to fuel empathy and compassion.

Watch: SBS On Demand

BURN AFTER READING

Runtime: 96 minutes

The Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading is one of their more divisive movies and people love and hate it for the same reason: It’s a farce where, when you boil it down, nothing happens. There are no stakes nor real consequences other than a dead body, but, damn if this story about a misplaced government file isn’t hilarious. Everyone, from George Clooney and Brad Pitt to Frances McDormand and John Malkovich are playing top class buffoons. This is really one where the journey is better than the destination.

Watch: Paramount+, Binge

RESERVOIR DOGS

Runtime: 99 minutes

Quentin Tarantino’s first feature-length movie is still some fans’ most beloved, and it is his shortest. After this, he rarely went under two hours and often went close to three. Full of Tarantino’s signature loves – violence, pop cultural references and a twisty structure – Reservoir Dogs is about a diamond heist that goes wrong. It’s also one of the most influential indie films of the 1990s.

Watch: Stan

LADY BIRD

Runtime: 94 minutes

Inspired by Greta Gerwig’s own youth in Sacramento, Lady Bird is a coming-of-age story that captures what it’s like to want to assert yourself at a time when you have so little control over your life. There’s something about that mix of confidence and actually not knowing all that much. In particular, Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf’s mother-and-daughter dynamic is heartbreakingly relatable.

Watch: Paramount+, Foxtel

SHIVA BABY

Runtime: 78 minutes

If Shiva Baby actually went for longer, your hair might turn white from stress. This assured feature debut from Emma Seligman (she would go on to make the riotous Bottoms) is filled with claustrophobic dread and tension to the point it could almost be a horror movie rather than a comedy of errors. It stars Rachel Sennott as Danielle, a uni student with a side hustle as a sugar baby who turns up to a wake for a family friend only to run into both her ex-girlfriend and one of her clients.

Watch: Digital rental