Neverending stories: five of the best very long films
Once Upon a Time in America (251 mins)
Another hacked-about epic, Sergio Leone’s 1984 last feature – a brutal, baffling chronicle of gangsters in New York’s Lower East Side – weighed in at almost four hours in its original cut. James Woods and Robert De Niro excel in this extended version, though there’s a nasty rape scene to be wary of.
Sátántangó (450 mins)
Béla Tarr is the master of bleakly beautiful but painstakingly leisurely art cinema and this 1994 film is his ultimate challenge. It follows a prophet-like figure who returns to a rundown village, but it’s all about the spell that the crisply desolate images exert.
Napoléon (330 mins)
Silent films could get pretty long but this 1927 work – one cut runs at more than nine hours – is probably the medium’s towering achievement: a monumental biopic of the general by Abel Gance. It’s now a more modest five hours in film historian Kevin Brownlow’s restoration.
Magnolia (189 mins)
The New Hollywood boomlet at the turn of the millennium had plenty of high points, but Paul Thomas Anderson’s three-hour 1999 drama was arguably the highest: an intricately designed tapestry of intertwined characters and stories, with a brilliant cast ranging from Julianne Moore to Tom Cruise.
Solaris (169 mins)
Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 cosmic meditation on memory and regret is not even his longest film, but as a way to just stretch out and let your mind float free it’s arguably his greatest – most evidently in the zero-grav “levitation” scene, which rises above the slightly primitive special effects to achieve an uplifting transcendence.