CINEMA HOTLINE: What are the best movies under 90-minutes?

American indies, international classics, and my personal favorites.

Earlier this year I saw Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion at “new york’s largest independent music venue” presented by EDGLRD a one-night-only live remix edition. The main screen was flanked by two others, projecting alternate and additional footage—chopped, screwed, and distorted in real time by Korine himself, tucked away at a computer somewhere in our midst.

Filmed like a first-person shooter, Baby Invasion unfolds from the POV of gunmen digitally masked in babyface avatars as they raid the mansions of the ultra-wealthy while a buzzing chat window pings incessantly. The “kill-the-rich” fantasy meets GTA on steroids pummels us with a dull gamified chaos as aimless as watching an uninspired player wandering an interactive sandbox. Burial supplied the dystopian electronica soundtrack, the best thing about it...¹

Cut it down and it might go down easier. Not better, just quicker. Aggro Dr1ft at least had the decency to wrap it up in 70 minutes. A shorter movie isn’t automatically a good one, but these days when a movie’s both brief and bearable, it feels like a minor miracle.

Which brings us to the latest edition of cinema hotline: movies that are 90 minute max. That’s shorter than most first-episodes of prestige tv.

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AMERICAN INDEPENDENT CINEMA

American indies have always had a thing for brevity, first features especially. Many of these are a window into a director’s sensibilities, before the budgets and runtimes, ballooned.

Eraserhead is 89 minutes. Aronofsky’s Pi (which I’ve still never watched) clocks in at 84 min. Ryan Coogler delivered Fruitvale Station in 85 minutes and Barry Jenkins gave us Medicine for Melancholy in 88. Before she crowned herself the bard of the Pacific Northwest, Kelly Reichert made the genre-inflected River of Grass (76 min) in her native Florida. Cheryl Dunye’s funny, sexy, meta debut The Watermelon Woman about Black lesbians packs in so much in just 85 minutes.

The list goes on.

Sean Baker and Ramin Bahrani’s debuts are both 87-minute neo-realist slices of immigrant life in the nyc: Take Out follows a Chinese food delivery worker in Chinatown trying to repay a debt, while Man Push Cart centers on a Pakistani coffee cart vendor.

Kicking and Screaming—Noah Baumbach’s talky debut, the ne plus ultra of post-grad slacker cinema—misses the cut off at 96 minutes, and some may feel overstuffed from the buffet of quips (not me.) The real marvel of economy though is The Squid and The Whale, sharp, sensitive and only 81 minutes long. I stand by it as his best film.

Reaching a little further back: Jim Jarmusch’s first two features, Permanent Vacation and Stranger Than Paradise, are 75 min and 90 min respectively. Start with the latter. His partner Sara Driver’s film When Pigs Fly (78 min) is another key example of of 80s No Wave cinema.

LA Rebellion filmmaker Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep stands tall at 75 minutes. And Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth (90 min) is a stunning intro to one of my favorite directors.

On the other side of the pond we have Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (88 min); Terence Davies's Distant Voices Still Lives (85 min)—a lyrical portrait of working-class Liverpool and domestic life in the 1940s, from one of Britain’s great cinematic elegists; and even Christopher Nolan managed to make Following a mere 70 minutes! Look what you can do under creative constraints.

INTERNATIONAL MOVIE CLASSICS

Succinct yet expansive enough to open wide the doors of cinematic possibility. This is also what you’d watch in the second semester of film school.

• THE BICYCLE THIEVES (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) — 89 min
  A cornerstone of Italian Neorealism, this film follows a working-class man and his young son as they search the streets of Rome for his stolen bicycle, a crucial tool for his new job. De Sica uses non-professional actors and real locations to tell a story that’s simple, devastating, unsentimental, but deeply human. If you're looking to understand how postwar Italian filmmakers reshaped cinema with empathy and realism, this is where to begin.

• RASHOMON (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) — 88 min

  Set in post-war Japan, Kurosawa’s tale of a murder told from four irreconcilable perspectives. A murder and a rape are retold by four people with completely different accounts. Kurosawa turns a simple premise into a philosophical inquiry on truth and human self-interest. This was the film that introduced Japanese cinema to the West.

• DAISIES (Věra Chytilová, 1966) — 76 min

  Two young women decide the world is spoiled so they shall be too, embarking on a wild spree of absurdity and appetite. A feminist satire cloaked in candy-colored chaos, a cinematic food fight against authority and order.

• BREATHLESS (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) — 90 min