To wrap up Marathon Week here on the Bleader, I thought I’d dive into my Top 5 Marathon Films—films that exceed the two-and-a-half-hour mark. Generally, I prefer movies with pithier running times—Alfred Hitchcock’s famous adage of, “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder” is one of the more brilliantly pragmatic things he ever said—but I surely can appreciate a film that requires an extended length.
There’s nothing like getting lost in a film—not merely in its narrative, but in its visual and formal storytelling as well. For me, these are films that seem to fly by, regardless of their gargantuan running times.