Five great long films that’ll really kill Covid-19 lockdown time

Got three hours to spare? Of course you do. Dig into these excellent extra-long, three-hour-plus films including The Irishman, Magnolia and Barry Lyndon

If you’ve really got the time, get stuck into the extended version of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which clocks in at over four hours

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Tom Cruise in a still from Magnolia (1999), which has a runtime of 188 minutes.

Published: 8:00pm, 22 Apr 2020Updated: 8:59pm, 22 Apr 2020

With lockdown dragging on and the cinemas still closed, here are five extra-long films to really help you pass the time.

1. Barry Lyndon (1975)

Based on William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, this immaculate period drama is one of the most Kubrickian films that Stanley Kubrick – a director for whom social distancing was more stylistic choice than medical necessity – ever made.

Set during and after the 18th-century Seven Years War and, at 187 minutes, just slightly shorter, it charts the rise and fall of Irish rogue Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal). But as ever with Kubrick, it’s not the what, but the how.

Designed to look like a William Hogarth painting and narrated in donnish tones by Michael Hordern, the film is so deliberately paced and flawlessly designed that legendary critic Pauline Kael called it a “coffee-table movie”. Certainly John Alcott’s Oscar-winning cinematography, which uses only natural light and candlelight, gives it an extraordinary painterly quality.

Although it disappointed upon release, the film has been reappraised over the years and is now considered one of the director’s most distinctive works. Not only that, it’s Martin Scorsese’s favourite Kubrick movie.

2. Magnolia (1999)

After Boogie Nights (1997), itself a not-inconsiderable 155 minutes long, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson set out to make something simple he could shoot in 30 days. The problem was, the script kept blossoming like the eponymous flower. Lasting 188 magnificent minutes, and making every second count, Magnolia is an intimate epic that exceeds all expectations.

The film dramatises an eventful day and night in the lives of a series of loosely connected residents of California’s San Fernando Valley and stars the cream of indie acting talent, from Julianne Moore to John C Reilly. Tom Cruise, as tortured pickup artist Frank TJ Mackey, tries twice as hard to keep up, and earned an Oscar nomination for his efforts.