Now that we’re in the dog days of summer (and, frankly, there just aren’t a ton of new releases to talk about), today kicks off a two-part tribute to a 2021 release by the year’s surging start: Drive My Car by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. The three-hour intimate Japanese epic that took the Oscars by storm, somewhat surprisingly, joins the hallowed annals of the Criterion Collection this week. I’ll have a more in-depth tribute to Hamaguchi later this week for subscribers, pulling on his own filmography as well as my own interview with him last year.
But for today’s big list, I wanted to highlight movies that are unapologetically lengthy. Some of these are longer than an entire series or season of television you might watch! When you’re in the hands of a master filmmaker who molds the central clay of the medium — time — these movies don’t feel like a chore. As the great Roger Ebert once said, “No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.”
So if you find yourself with over two-and-a-half hours of uninterrupted time, strap in and watch one of these ten fantastic films.
American Honey, 163 minutes, Showtime Anytime/rental
Andrea Arnold’s American odyssey necessitates a grand canvas. American Honey, her chronicle of wayward youth who find community as a roving band of subscription salesmen, captures something extraordinary about the mid-’10s national character. Consider it something of a 21st-century Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America — the kind of keen understanding of a country that only someone from outside its borders can make. But what really makes the film soar is that Arnold is not issuing proclamations from on high, as many who make films beginning with the word “American” are wont to do. The makeshift family she depicts in front of the camera reflects an egalitarian spirit behind it as well; in fact, everyone receives equal billing in the closing credits.
Breaking the Waves, 159 minutes, HBO Max/Criterion Channel
The Danish director Lars von Trier is something of a pariah in the film world after his ill-advised and repugnant comments about Hitler at Cannes in 2011. It’s sadly in keeping with the persona of this enfant terrible … but, oddly enough, not necessarily his movies. His bombastic melodrama Breaking the Waves shocked me with its giant open heart when I watched it for the first time a few years ago. It’s a film that looks to the heavens to pass final judgment on the tale of Emily Watson’s good-natured Bess, a woman who invokes the scorn of her provincial Scottish town by having sex with other men after her husband’s paralysis (with his permission, no less). von Trier successfully channels both the naturalism of the couple’s private moments and the grandiloquence of lives that somehow stand for something more.
A Brighter Summer Day, 236 minutes, Criterion Channel
Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day is not a film you watch so much as it’s a film you live in. It doesn’t feel like he’s building a story — it’s akin to witnessing the building (or reconstruction) of a community in Taiwan. The film feels too expansive to possibly grasp in a single viewing because the ensemble is just so sprawling. If this all feels like something to dissuade you from watching, don’t let it be. Sometimes you need to watch a movie so you can later rewatch it, and this is one of those. I’ve let it all wash over me, and I’m excited to one day return and move beyond the richness of its immediate textures and follow character storylines in greater depth.
Happy Hour, 317 minutes, Criterion Channel
That’s not a typo — it’s 317 minutes, not 3 hours and 17 minutes. But at a certain point over those five hours with the four women of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour, the characters stop feeling like people you watch and start seeming like people you live with. Hamaguchi never hurries the action, allowing events like a communication seminar or a literary reading/Q&A to play out at their full duration … but in a way that is not meant to torment the audience. The filmmaking grants these 37-year-old Japanese women such dignity in their everyday dealings, and when Hamaguchi punctures this recreated reality by diving into the symbolic and psychological realm of the characters, those moments really land with searing impact.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 201 minutes, HBO Max/Criterion Channel
If there are any of these movies I must encourage you to fully commit to watching in one sitting without checking your phone, it’s Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece Jeanne Dielman. This fiercely feminist film chronicles three pivotal days in the life of a Belgian housewife nearing her breaking point in the most delicate of slow burns. Akerman pulls off cinema’s equivalent of making a mountain of a molehill by fastidiously focusing on Jeanne’s domestic routines to convey her tumultuous inner state. While these might seem banal to watch multiple times, they are anything but repetitive. You have to know her process well enough that you can spot when Jeanne deviates from it. And when she does, the smallest moments somehow land with a tremendously outsized impact.
Peterloo, 154 minutes, Amazon Prime Video
British director Mike Leigh has gained great renown for his unique writing style, in which he produces his scripts out of extensive workshopping with the actors who will perform them. It’s interesting to keep this in mind during his latest (and perhaps last?) feature Peterloo, which subverts expectations of how to treat the subject of an 1819 massacre in England. Leigh’s film is about the very nature of political communication — how to persuade people with words, how to galvanize a crowd with oratory, and how sometimes those cries fall on deaf ears. It’s a great bottom-up look at how democracy should function.
RRR, 187 minutes, Netflix
If all of the above films just sound like an unpleasant slog, don’t let that discourage you from the rip-roaring fun that is RRR. This film came out just this year, and perhaps you’ve even seen the errant tweet or news article about it and wondered what on earth the movie is. I was once one of those people. Don’t drag your heels. This Tollywood (not Bollywood — still India, but different film industry and language) action epic is hands-down the most absurd, ludicrous, and riotous thing I’ve watched in a long time. If my face was gifted with the stretchiness of Elastigirl, my jaw would have hit the ground countless times. Don’t miss this absolute blast.
Silence, 161 minutes, Amazon Prime Video/Paramount+
Do you really expect Martin Scorsese to tackle the nature of seemingly unresponsive deities, institutional religion, and wavering personal faithfulness in under two-and-a-half hours? If you’ve watched many of the legendary director’s films, you know that so much of his work builds up to this ultimate interrogation of the role Catholicism plays in the world. Through the spiritually sound performance of Andrew Garfield as the conflicted Portuguese missionary Father Rodrigues, Silence compassionately shakes the very foundations of what salvation means. It’s a richly rewarding journey that one could only take under the guidance of an artist who has worked their entire career toward this culminating moment.
Solaris, 169 minutes, HBO Max/Criterion Channel
There are some “just vibes” filmmakers for whom I don’t think it’s some kind of mortal sin to look at the plot summaries beforehand so you can just get on their wavelength. Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky is one such filmmaker, and Solaris is peak vibes. This psychological thriller simmers as it charts a scientific researcher investigating an unexplained spate of emotional breakdowns aboard a space station. Of course, that scientist himself begins to manifest some symptoms himself in the form of spectral appearances by his deceased wife. This is one of those movies where once you watch it, you’ll start seeing its fingerprints everywhere in the fifty years since its release — ranging a gamut as wide as Terrence Malick to Christopher Nolan.
Toni Erdmann, 162 minutes, rental
I know a “German comedy” might sound like something of an oxymoron, but Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann defies explanation just as it demolishes national barriers. This father-daughter story lays bare the central tragedy of parenting in all its tragicomic dimensionality: children are constructed from their parents but will ultimately develop to become something bigger. The roots have no say over which direction a tree’s branches grow. Though the role of being someone’s child is one of the first roles people learn to play, it is one of the easiest for them to discard or dismiss. (This paragraph comes excerpted from my nearly 4,000 words about this film that don’t have a home — perhaps if enough people clamor for it, one day I’ll release or re-pitch the essay!)
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd.
A belated happy 200th episode to the folks at This Had Oscar Buzz! (Subscribers may recall co-host Chris Feil coming on the newsletter to answer some questions after this year’s Oscar nominations.) This two-and-a-half-hour special episode is a perfect introduction to the marvelously minutiae-loving podcast.
Because I often get gossipy-adjacent questions about who is nice in Hollywood, I wanted to redirect everyone’s attention to this podcast that breaks it down with people who are much better connected than I am:
Given the focus on interviews/profiles as gauges of a star’s character, this also got me thinking about interviews where I can recall someone asking genuine questions about me. The list I came up with (you may note it’s not exactly populated with A-listers): Scott Speedman, Franz Rogowski, Cooper Raiff, Jesse Plemons, Rob Morgan, Eddie Redmayne, Barry Jenkins.
Manohla Darghis’ appreciation of James Caan in The New York Times got at a really interesting question that always lodged under my skin. It’s clear that he could go toe-to-toe with the DeNiros, Pacinos, Nicholsons, etc. of the age … so why didn’t his career necessarily reflect that?
Also, if you’re looking for an exciting new novel — I absolutely TORE through Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This. I have never read anything that quite puts into prose the sensation of being Extremely Online or captures the syntax and logic of digital communication. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read.
For The Playlist, I reviewed a new film called Murina that is worth keeping an eye out for. It’s the debut of Croatian director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović who is on to great things. (Martin Scorsese, who executive produced, sure knows how to pick them!)
Also, subscribers got a long-delayed analysis of the last five years in Robert Pattinson’s career. Check it out — a free 7-day trial gets you access to this post and my full archive of subscriber-only content!
That’s all for today! Subscribers, check your inboxes later this week for a little something more on Hamaguchi!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall