You Can Watch Three Of These Movies In The Time It Takes To View The Irishman

Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s five time Oscar-nominated coming-of-age tale about Sacramento high school senior Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), has a run-time of 93 minutes. In *just* over an hour and a half, the movie paints a tender, heart-rending picture of a young woman grappling with first loves, heartbreak, ambition, and family. It’s a cinematic achievement that’s both granularly specific in its story, and larger-than-life in its scope. 

Now compare that to the nearly three hour run-time of It Chapter Two (yes, three hours for only half of the thirst clown saga), or the 140-minutes I spent watching Bad Times At The El Royale, an admittedly fabulous crime romp that could have shaved down a full 30 minutes of action and still blown me away with Chris Hemsworth’s Deep Purple dance. 

This brings me to what I have come to call the Lady Bird test. In other words, if a movie exceeds 93 minutes, has it managed to sweep me off my feet in quite the same way? 

I’m not saying long movies can’t be great. Avengers: Endgame, for example, runs just over three hours. But as the grand finale for 22 movies, that feels earned; the director’s cut of Ari Aster’s Midsommar extends a 2h18 min film into 2h50 min — and damn if I didn’t love every second of extra Hargas time; even Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, whose 209 min runtime became the butt of so many awards season jokes, felt like it deserved the supersized canvas that those almost four hours provided. As film critic Roger Ebert put it, “no good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.”

And yet, lengthy run-times are a luxury afforded only to a select group of filmmakers. Women and POC filmmakers are only rarely given the budget or the support required to make films exceeding the indie-friendly 90-minute mark, and the stories they tell are too often dismissed as trivial or niche, unworthy of storytelling of that scope. 

In August 2019, critic Hanna Flint asked Twitter to name the best women-directed films with a run-time of over two-and-a-half hours. The answers were few and far between. Among those mentioned: Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2h43min), Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2h37min), and Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas (2h52min). Ask me to name epics directed by men and I could rattle off enough names to fill the length of Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood. 

But as the Lady Bird test proves, length isn’t a good indicator of quality. Scroll through for some of the best movies by and about women that you can enjoy in under two hours.