InkBlog

Sure, it’s great to turn off your mind and immerse yourself in a three-hour-long orgy of cinematic excess. But sometimes you just want a good story, capably told, that gets in and out in less than 90 minutes. After all, you’re a busy person, with many responsibilities! Maybe you’ve only got a short window, or maybe you’re just trying to sneak in one more movie in a late-night marathon. Whatever your motivation, here are more than 50 (relatively) brief films worth your limited time.

The below movies are listed by length, starting with the shortest.

Dumbo

Year: 1941
Run Time: 64 minutes
Director: Ben Sharpsteen

Disney’s fourth animated movie was conceived as a model of simplicity and efficiency, made to recoup the losses of Fantasia. Even so, in just 64 minutes we get flying elephants, a valuable lesson in an interspecies mouse-elephant friendship, and what was, for at least one 5-year-old watching it on video, the astounding experience of seeing an adult have to explain why Dumbo was drunk. (For other time-efficient nostalgia trips, nearly every pre-1990s Disney movie clocks in under 80 minutes, including Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, and The Jungle Book.)

Frankenstein

Year: 1931
Run Time: 70 minutes
Director: James Whale

“It’s alive!” It sure is — James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein buzzes throughout with the frenetic, fearful energy of its metaphorical origins in Mary Shelley’s novel. Boris Karloff’s monster is about as iconic as anything the movies have ever produced, and it only took 70 minutes for him to put a mark on horror that lasts to this day.

Pickpocket

Year: 1959
Run Time: 75 Minutes
Directory: Robert Bresson

French filmmaker Robert Bresson’s movies can feel like alien experiences: expressionless, spare, and slowed to a crawl, they withhold from the audience most of what they expect from a filmic experience. But Pickpocket, with its noir-inflected plot and tense theft sequences, is a good entry point — and that last shot is a doozy. 75 minutes.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Year: 1993
Run Time: 76 minutes
Director: Tim Burton

Short enough to enthrall your children but potent enough to thrill adults, Tim Burton’s stop-motion spectacular is more than just the Halloween costumes it’s spawned.

Primer

Year: 2004
Run Time: 77 minutes
Director: Shane Carruth

Even more than its 77-minute run time, Shane Carruth’s labyrinthine time-travel masterpiece is remarkable for an even greater feat of economy: It only cost $7,000 to make. That’s because Carruth did pretty much everything — writing, directing, producing, editing, and composing the music for the movie himself. But all the money in the world can’t buy ingenuity like this, which is why the movie is now a cult classic for fans of brainy cinema.

Shiva Baby

Year: 2020
Run Time: 77 minutes
Director: Emma Seligman

Some anti-anxiety meds take about an hour to kick in, which is funny, because that’s also how long Emma Seligman’s claustrophobic comedy takes to send you into an eye-covering mess. Rachel Sennott stars as a college student trapped at a shiva alongside her ex-girlfriend, her sugar daddy, his wife and baby, and what feels like dozens of nosy relatives. Mourning has never been so cringeworthy.

Before Sunset

Year: 2004
Run Time: 80 minutes
Director: Richard Linklater

The second film in Richard Linklater’s Before series, Before Sunset clocks in at a svelte 80 minutes. But in that short time, it paints a picture of two lives lived entirely without each other — and the specter of that absence, as much as the astonishing chemistry of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, is what anchors one of the greatest love stories ever told.

March of the Penguins

Year: 2005
Run Time: 80 minutes
Director: Luc Jacquet

It took French director Luc Jacquet and his cinematographers a year in Antarctica to shoot this stunning, Academy Award–winning documentary about the ultra-extreme breeding ritual of Empire penguins, who have to travel insane distances in insane conditions to feed themselves and their young. Come for adventure, danger, monogamous penguin love, and those super-cute chicks.

Rope

Year: 1948
Run Time: 80 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock

One of the great pieces of fiction devoted to the idea of “the perfect crime,” Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope represents the master at his most technically innovative. Shot in a series of long takes, Rope is edited to look like one long, continuous scene, presaging the technique that Alejandro G. Iñárritu would employ in his Oscar-winning Birdman. Hitchcock didn’t think the experiment worked out, but hey, it was worth a shot.

District B13

Year: 2004
Run Time: 81 minutes
Director: Pierre Morel

From Taken director Pierre Morel comes this fleet-of-foot action film where a walled-off ghetto provides plenty of opportunity for crime … and parkour!

Elephant

Year: 2003
Run Time: 81 minutes
Director: Gus Van Sant

As the film’s told in real time, you wouldn’t want a school-shooting movie like Elephant to be any longer than it is. Thankfully, what director Gus Van Sant gives us is poetic and provocative.

Run Lola Run

Year: 1998
Run Time: 81 minutes
Director: Tom Tykwer

Fittingly, this Tom Tykwer–directed thrill ride is as fleet as its title. Packing more into 80-ish minutes than most movies would think of for an entire two-hour run time, it’s a triptych of “what if” stories in which Franka Potente must scrounge up enough cash to save her dumb but hunky boyfriend from certain doom. Then again, perhaps doom isn’t all that certain in the next life.

Sleepwalk With Me

Year: 2012
Run Time: 81 minutes
Director: Mike Birbiglia

Comedian Mike Birbiglia’s auteur turn is a concise portrait of the stand-up lifestyle with one added wrinkle: He sleepwalks. The sleepwalking is a metaphor, and the comedy is a tantalizing sample of Birbiglia’s stuff, even in dramatized form. Next time you can’t decide between a stand-up special and movie, split the difference with this.

The Squid and the Whale

Year: 2005
Run Time: 81 minutes
Director: Noah Baumbach

An acerbically witty and deeply honest look at divorce from the inside, The Squid and the Whale solidified Noah Baumbach’s very specific vision of Brooklyn malaise. Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels’s marriage implodes, while the couple’s eldest son (Jesse Eisenberg) flirts with douchebaggery, and their younger son (Owen Kline) discovers the joys of masturbating and smearing the result in unexpected places.

Toy Story

Year: 1995
Run Time: 81 minutes
Director: John Lasseter

You can debate over whether the original adventures of Woody and Buzz Lightyear is superior to the sequels, but you can’t debate one thing: Its run time is objectively shorter. Pixar didn’t need much time to set a standard for computer-animated features that few of its successors could match.

A Night at the Roxbury

Year: 1998
Run Time: 82 minutes
Director: John Fortenberry

“What is love?” It’s turning a half-baked Saturday Night Live sketch into a half-baked feature; Will Ferrell’s performance, as one half of a brotherly duo with fellow SNL-er Chris Kattan, is the epitome of making something from absolutely nothing.

This Is Spinal Tap

Year: 1984
Run Time: 82 minutes
Director: Rob Reiner

This rockumentary’s speakers may go to 11, but the film’s run time doesn’t.

Blackfish

Year: 2013
Run Time: 83 minutes
Director: Gabriela Cowperthwaite

Twitter aside, there’s no better way to get indignant in a short amount of time than by watching Blackfish, Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s documentary look into the world of captive killer whales. Blackfish had substantive change on more than just SeaWorld’s share price — laws regarding orca captivity have been passed in the film’s wake, and SeaWorld has moved away from live performances featuring killer whales.

Ghost in the Shell

Year: 1995
Run Time: 83 minutes
Director: Mamoru Oshii

Mamoru Oshii’s adaptation of Masamune Shirow’s cyberpunk manga is a high point of ’90s animation, Japanese or otherwise. Taking place in a futuristic Japan where cybernetic enhancements are the norm, its main character, cyborg agent Major Motoko Kusanagi, must track down an elusive hacker who has been taking over the networked brains of government officials. Come for the visuals, which would influence two decades of Hollywood action fare, stay for the heady philosophical robot angst.

Borat

Year: 2006
Run Time: 84 minutes
Director: Larry Charles

Considering the breadth and influence of Sacha Baron Cohen’s groundbreaking mockumentary, it’s hard to believe the film is only 84 minutes long; hell, it takes longer than that to say its full title. But Cohen moves with aggressive intent through a series of killer gags — though if we never hear someone say “my wife” again, that would be fine.

Black Dynamite

Year: 2009
Run Time: 84 minutes
Director: Scott Sanders

If you’ve ever wondered how blaxploitation cinema looks from the vantage point of the present, Black Dynamite is your answer. In a fleet 84 minutes, it nicely pays homage to, and sends up, most of the hallmarks of ’70s movies like Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song and Shaft. But Black Dynamite also has enough jokes and absurdity to justify its existence on its own merits, not just as a parody of the past.

Chronicle

Year: 2012
Run Time: 84 minutes
Director: Josh Trank

As superhero movies become more and more bloated, why not revisit this gem: an origin story with a svelte run time that leaves you wanting more, instead of dreading an entire lumbering franchise to come?

Pi

Year: 1998
Run Time: 84 minutes
Director: Darren Aronofsky

Like Primer (which appears earlier on this list), Darren Aronofsky’s debut Pi is a film whose short run time and low budget belie an almost unbelievable amount of complexity. Where Primer uses that complexity as a framework, Pi wears it on its sleeve, creating a movie overflowing with ideas and possessed by their power. If you were ever bored by math in high school, let Aronofsky reinvigorate your taste for numbers.

Slow West

Year: 2015
Run Time: 84 minutes
Director: John Maclean

You could almost think of John Maclean’s Slow West as a cover of the Western genre — but one by a band that has more than a little talent of its own. What Slow West lacks in originality, it makes for in the vibrancy of its colors, the vivacity of its performances — Michael Fassbender and Ben Mendelsohn are at the top of their respective games — and the fury of its climactic shootout. And it’s less than half as long as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

High Noon

Year: 1952
Run Time: 85 minutes
Director: Fred Zinnemann

Watch this Gary Cooper Western at high noon, and you’ll be free to grab lunch at 1:30!

The Evil Dead

Year: 1981
Run Time: 85 minutes
Director: Sam Raimi

Sam Raimi’s original horror classic was made as cheaply as it could be — there wasn’t enough money for more time! — but that’s part of why it’s so low-fi effective.

Fruitvale Station

Year: 2013
Run Time: 85 minutes
Director: Ryan Coogler

Though it easily could have become didactic, Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan kept their story of gunned-down Oscar Grant as appealingly intimate as possible.

The Killing

Year: 1956
Run Time: 85 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick

If you’ve seen a heist movie in the last 60 years, consider that it probably pays an incalculable debt to this, Stanley Kubrick’s breakout film — a bona fide classic the director made at the tender age of 28. More about the clockwork preparations that go into planning a racetrack robbery than the actual robbery itself — though it certainly delivers in that respect — The Killing packs more narrative meat than most television shows manage in a season.

My Octopus Teacher

Year: 2020
Run Time: 85 minutes
Directors: Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed

An Oscar-winning documentary that poses the immortal question: Does this man want to … sleep with an octopus? He doesn’t, but part of the fun of Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed’s film is the way diver Craig Foster’s relationship with his underwater friend does indeed fulfill all the rom-com beats, from the meet-cute to the rift to the touching reunion.

Frances Ha

Year: 2012
Run Time: 86 minutes
Director: Noah Baumbach

Noah Baumbach is the king of brevity. This modest comedy feels short, in part because Greta Gerwig (who co-wrote the script) is so darn likeable as a 27-year-old, not-exactly-aspiring dancer drifting through New York, trying, somehow, to get her shit together.

My Neighbor Totoro

Year: 1988
Run Time: 86 minutes
Director: Hayao Miyazaki

The cuddly cartoon creature Totoro may be large, but he can be light and nimble when necessary. So, too, does this wonderful Hayao Miyazaki film deliver pure pleasure with a feather’s brief, soft touch.

Paranormal Activity

Year: 2007
Run Time: 86 minutes
Director: Oren Peli

The found-footage format lulls you into complacency with its long takes, but the film itself can’t be too long, or else you’ll just get bored. The quick and nasty first installment of the Paranormal Activity franchise set the template with a scary-short run time.

Safety Not Guaranteed

Year: 2012
Run Time: 86 minutes
Director: Colin Trevorrow

Before he had two hours and five minutes to spend on giant dinosaurs in Jurassic World, director Colin Trevorrow turned in this comparatively trim sci-fi rom-com with Mark Duplass and Aubrey Plaza. Since the movie’s about time travel, it’s fitting that it doesn’t waste yours.

What We Do in the Shadows

Year: 2014
Run Time: 86 minutes
Directors: Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement

The 87-minute mark is just about ideal for comedies, including this cult fave about surprisingly mundane vampires starring Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi. The movie has since inspired a hilarious television version.

Breathless

Year: 1960
Run Time: 87 minutes
Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Everything about Breathless is abrupt: Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave trailblazer brought short shots, jump cuts, and short hair into fashion (at least for Jean Seberg). Godard does it all in a brisk run time that’s still still 65 minutes longer than anyone’s ever been able to hold their breath.

City Lights

Year: 1931
Run Time: 87 minutes
Director: Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece carries so many of his most famous sequences on its slim spine. Watch it in appropriately silent wonder.

Child’s Play

Year: 1988
Run Time: 87 minutes
Director: Tom Holland

Malevolent doll Chucky wants to play with your child … but only for the length of a time-out.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Year: 2009
Run Time: 87 minutes
Director: Wes Anderson

Each frame of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox had to be painstakingly arranged by hand, which is as good a reason to keep things brief as you’ll find in moviemaking.

Airplane!

Year: 1980
Run Time: 88 minutes
Directors: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker

Stuffing hundreds of punch lines, visual gags, and non sequiturs into less than 90 minutes, Airplane! boasts arguably the highest laughs-per-minute ratio in cinema history. Surely, we are serious.

Attack the Block

Year: 2011
Run Time: 88 minutes
Director: Joe Cornish

How do aliens in movies always know to show up in Times Square or the White House? Isn’t it more likely they’d end up in a random field somewhere, or, as in Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block, a grimy tower block in south London? The homespun charm of this sci-fi film made it a cult hit, and helped launch the career of its young star John Boyega.

Crank

Year: 2006
Run Time: 88 minutes
Directors: Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor

Jason Statham got kidnapped by some bad guys and now he has to keep his heart rate elevated … or else he will die! The result is 88 minutes of pure adrenaline.

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle

Year: 2004
Run Time: 88 minutes
director: Danny Leiner

Sometimes you just want a movie that’s going to give you exactly what it says on the tin. Over the course of one wild night in suburban New Jersey, Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) do indeed make it to White Castle, but only after dealing with racist cops, drug-crazed Princetonians, and a troublemaking Neil Patrick Harris. (Is there any other kind?)

Medicine for Melancholy

Year: 2008
Run Time: 88 minutes
Director: Barry Jenkins

The debut feature of Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins, Medicine for Melancholy follows two black San Francisco residents (Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins) the day after a one-night stand, as they stroll through the city debating racism, gentrification, and black love. A Netflix staple, this low-key rom-com comes heavily recommended.

Rashomon

Year: 1950
Run Time: 88 minutes
Director: Akira Kurosawa

In less than 90 minutes, Akira Kurosawa told a torrid tale of rape and murder through unreliable narrators. The subsequent six decades have seen his trick ripped off by everybody else.

Welcome to the Dollhouse

Year: 1995
Run Time: 88 minutes
Director: Todd Solondz

Todd Solondz’s off-kilter coming-of-age tale follows the adventures of Dawn Weiner (Heather Matarazzo), a lonely tween navigating a particularly brutal suburban hellscape. Thank goodness it’s so short — there’s only so much time a person can spend with their face hidden behind their hands.

The Wicker Man

Year: 1973
Run Time: 88 minutes
Director: Robin Hardy

Before there was Nicholas Cage in a bear suit, there was Edward Woodward as a prim Christian detective investigating a pagan colony run by Christopher Lee on a remote Scottish island. Woodward still ends up in the same place Cage does — but 14 minutes faster.

Zombieland

Year: 2009
Run Time: 88 minutes
Director: Ruben Fleischer

Not all short movies have to run with ruthless efficiency. Zombieland manages to turn a zombie apocalypse into an occasion for lazy hang-out comedy. Our core foursome — Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin — even has time for an extended stay at Bill Murray’s house.

Eraserhead

Year: 1977
Run Time: 89 minutes
Director: David Lynch

In heaven, everything is fine. In the world of Eraserhead, the first feature of David Lynch, everything is emphatically not fine: Strange industrial noises fill the soundtrack, all efforts at human connection go awry, and worst of all, our hero has fathered a disgusting inhuman creature the wriggles and oozes all over its crib. Lynch apparently cut 20 minutes out of the film — keeping it in would have been the only thing that made this movie weirder.

The Limey

Year: 1999
Run Time: 89 minutes
Director: Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh was at the height of his powers with this taut crime thriller, which stars Terence Stamp as a British gangster out to avenge the death of his daughter. The director’s flair for unconventional edits sets the film apart from the usual revenging-dad films (though Stamp’s brilliantly unexpressive face doesn’t hurt, either).

The Lion King

Year: 1994
Run Time: 89 minutes
Director: Rob Minkoff, Roger Allers

Disney’s most epic movie is also one of its shortest: It takes just 88 minutes for Simba to complete the circle of life, from baby lion hoisted into the sunlight, to teen lion living with a warthog and a meerkat, to adult lion who battles his evil uncle Scar (Jeremy Irons, working that deliciously evil purr). It’s the only version of Hamlet that’s less than three hours.

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On

Year: 2021
Run Time: 89 minutes
Director: Dean Fleischer Camp

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On originated in 2010 as a series of tossed-off, no-budget YouTube videos created by Jenny Slate and her then-husband, Dean Fleischer Camp, featuring Slate voicing a roughly animated one-eyed seashell’s musings on life. This may seem like a pretty thin idea on which to hang an entire feature — even with an 89-minute run time. But the film makes its own insignificance a virtue, then uses that to slip us into an unexpectedly moving story.

Sexy Beast

Year: 2000
Run Time: 89 minutes
Director: Jonathan Glazer

Ben Kingsley is on literal fire as a sociopathic criminal with an endless stream of amazing quotes (“Look at your suntan, it’s leather. We could make a fucking suitcase out of you.”) who teams up with Ray Winston’s retired criminal and Ian McShane’s crime lord for one last heist, cutting every single person he meets straight to their core.

Stand By Me

Year: 1986
Run Time: 89 minutes
Director: Rob Reiner

Rob Reiner’s adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Body” leaves out the frights for which the author is known, but keeps King’s ineffable dread of the unknown: For the four teen boys who go in search of a dead body, the danger lurking around the corner is simply adulthood. If only puberty could be handled this quickly in real life.

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