‘Eighty-nine perfect minutes’: 30 of the best short films and novels
Agrowing trend for longer films and heftier novels has recently been attracting indignant comment. Martin Scorsese’s latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, has been in the news not for its content but because it is three hours 20 minutes long (and he has form on this – The Irishman was three hours 29 minutes). This year’s Oscar contenders have also been taking their – and our – time: All Quiet on the Western Front, Elvis and Tár are two-and-a-half hours long each. And Avatar: The Way of Water, the third highest-grossing film of all time, spills on for three hours 12 minutes. Is the idea that sitting in a cinema interminably makes it more of an event, earns you epic stripes as a cinema-goer – makes you a co-hero along with Batman (whose most recent outing was three hours long)? Or are you more likely to be furtively checking the time in the dark?
Length seems to be becoming dangerously confused with artistic prestige – as though short equals superficial or critically lightweight. According to publisher Flipsnack, novels have been getting longer for a couple of decades. The average length of those on the Booker prize shortlist, in 2019, was 530 pages. Fantasy fiction is especially incontinent: the last Game of Thrones book, A Dance With Dragons, was 413,202 words, trumping the dimensions of the Victorian novel and in defiance of our distractible modern attention spans. Are we, in the age of the soundbite, tweet and TikTok, becoming rebelliously nostalgic for an era when there seemed to be more time?
Evelyn Waugh once said there was nothing, no matter how momentous, that you couldn’t fit on to the back of a postcard
That might be positive, but the dangers of valuing length in and of itself could not be clearer. We seem to be coming adrift from the trim advice that dominated a generation of early and mid-20th-century writers. EM Forster championed brevity, once remarking, “One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.” Ernest Hemingway advised: “To be successful in writing, use short sentences.” George Orwell was more ruthless still: “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” For here is the curious truth: length is easier than brevity. Length can be an indulgence, a rummaging for clarity and, at its worst, an affront to a reader. Most of us will have had the experience of leaving a cinema feeling that the film could have painlessly had half an hour lopped off and been the better for it. It is easier to let a story run on than to polish it until it shines. Editing must not become an endangered art. The novelist Toni Morrison spoke out about the importance of what is not said, the reading between the lines. It is best to leave some of the work to us.
Evelyn Waugh once said there was nothing, no matter how momentous, that you couldn’t fit onto the back of a postcard. He would have loved Dorothy Parker’s joke of a poem, entitled Two-Volume Novel:
The sun’s gone dim, and
The moon’s turned black;
For I loved him, and
He didn’t love back.
Shakespeare’s compulsive talker Polonius declared “Brevity is the soul of wit”, but his garrulous inability to embody his own wisdom indirectly killed him. To remind ourselves why “less is more”, we have compiled 30 of the best short feature films (of around 90 minutes or under) and novels (under roughly 200 pages); further below, we list 10 works we consider to have earned their right to length. Now is the moment to revel in concision, to defend the satisfactions of travelling light, the pleasures of feeling that not a word, image or minute is being wasted, of not allowing form to smother content, while registering that it will always remain a personal matter for artist and audience to determine what constitutes the perfect length. Here’s to knowing when to stop.
Kate Kellaway
15 of the best short feature films
Mark Kermode
Silent Running
89 mins (Douglas Trumbull, 1972)
Doug Trumbull’s sublime debut feature is my favourite science fiction film; an unabashedly sentimental tale of a lone astronaut (Bruce Dern) cast adrift in space, tending to the last of the despoiled Earth’s salvaged forests, with only robot drones for companionship. Trumbull worked on Kubrick’s epochal 2001: A Space Odyssey, and described Silent Running as a response to the sterile coldness of that acclaimed (and lengthy) classic. A sublime score by Peter Schickele with a couple of folksy performances by Joan Baez complete the picture – all in 89 perfect minutes.
The Wicker Man
87 (to 99) mins (Robin Hardy, 1973)
Watch the original trailer for The Wicker Man.
Restored cuts of Robin Hardy’s folk-horror classic (famously hailed as the “Citizen Kane of horror movies”) variously run to up-to-99 minutes. But it was a cut-down 87-minute version that first terrified cinema audiences back in 1973. Released as the supporting feature to Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, the truncated version has long been vilified by fans (myself included), who insist that it stripped away the weird richness of the original. Yet somehow it still works, leaving audiences shaken by its fiery final act, even in its shortest form.
Punch-Drunk Love
95 mins (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002)
Luís Guzman and Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love. Photograph: Columbia/Sportsphoto/Allstar
Paul Thomas Anderson’s shortest feature is also arguably his best – a brilliantly unhinged love story boasting an eye-opening performance by Adam Sandler and a career-best turn from Emily Watson. With its rich blue/red/green colour scheme and madcap dreams of flight, Punch-Drunk Love has been read by some as a complex Superman allegory, although it’s the cartoonish strains of Popeye that provide a signature tune in the form of Olive Oil’s song He Needs Me. Following on from PTA’s three-hour-plus epic Magnolia, this was the film no one expected – but everyone needed.
Wendy Ide
My Life As a Courgette
65 mins (Claude Barras, 2016)
Claude Barras’s Oscar-nominated stop-motion animation is a gorgeous, fully fleshed-out and emotionally wrenching journey, in miniature. This tale of an orphaned nine-year-old boy, nicknamed “Courgette”, who comes to terms with his grief and guilt, eventually finding a family and friendship with fellow orphans in a children’s home, is a slip of a thing. But the soulful animation style – those huge, hungry eyes – and the tenderness of the writing (Céline Sciamma wrote the screenplay) make this a minor-key masterpiece, rendered in modelling clay.
Petite Maman
72 mins (Céline Sciamma, 2021)
Watch a trailer for Petite Maman.
Writer and director Céline Sciamma has an acute eye for the kind of details that speak volumes – it’s perhaps thanks to this that she is so gifted in the art of brevity. Petite Maman is a beguiling little film, a piece of storytelling of crystalline delicacy. The picture tells of an encounter between two little girls who build a firm friendship in the woods. One is visiting with her mother, following her grandmother’s death; the other lives nearby. But they have more in common than they first realise. It’s utterly enchanting.
Shiva Baby
77 mins (Emma Seligman, 2020)
Rachel Sennott in Shiva Baby. Photograph: Organic Publicity
It doesn’t take long for a carefully balanced framework of lies to collapse. In the case of Emma Seligman’s exquisitely mortifying comedy of manners, it takes just 77 uncomfortably hilarious minutes. Danielle (a star-making turn from Rachel Sennott) is forced to attend a Jewish funeral service with her overbearing parents, only to discover that her sugar daddy is there with his wife and child, and her fabrication about being an up-and-coming law student is about to be busted. Extremely funny but simultaneously excruciating.
Guy Lodge
Wendy and Lucy
80 mins (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)
One of America’s great minimalist film-makers, Kelly Reichardt tends to work in a terse, unfussy register, and to examine soft-spoken, inward characters – which can make her more recent films, which have crept toward the two-hour mark, feel briefer than they are. But at the start of her career, she was a staunch 80-minutes-and-under artist, never more effectively than in this wrenching portrait of a young drifter (Michelle Williams) and her dog, on a shoestring trek across the country in pursuit of work in Alaska. It’s the vast expanse of the American dream, crumpled and torn in short form.
The Palm Beach Story
88 mins (Preston Sturges, 1942)
The Palm Beach Story, with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
Classic screwball comedies are always so heavy on plot – a veritable pileup of confusions, deceptions, reversals and explanations ahead of an all’s-well-that-ends-well conclusion – that they practically have to proceed at double speed to come in under time. Preston Sturges was the master of this fast-talking form, and this delicious romcom announces its breakneck intentions from the opening credits, set to a hyperactive mashup of the Wedding March and the William Tell Overture. Its marital farce – in which a happy couple divorce so that she can go gold-digging for the both of them – leaves you winded in just under 90 minutes.
Rashomon
88 mins (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
Rashomon, starring Toshiro Mifune, left. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library Ltd/Alamy
Akira Kurosawa’s ingeniously splintered study of a brutal woodland crime – the rape of a young bride and the murder of her samurai husband – changed the rules of perspective and chronology in cinematic storytelling. Rotating between the differing points of view of victim, perpetrator and witness, and inviting the audience to draw their own conclusions from the inconsistencies, it somehow packed all these overlapping narratives into a brisk 88 minutes. It’s been repeatedly remade and endlessly imitated, never quite as economically: most recently, Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel invited direct comparisons, and clocked in at 153 minutes.
Xan Brooks
High Noon
85 mins (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)
High Noon is the first great revisionist western – shot in the shadow of the McCarthy witch-hunts and described by John Wayne as “the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my life”. The killer’s due on the midday train but lonesome Gary Cooper is going to have to face the danger alone, because he’s surrounded by cowards and everyone’s running scared. Fred Zinnemann’s drama plays just a shade quicker than real time, seemingly prolonging the agony while rushing us headlong to the gunfight. So buckle up and say a prayer. It’s always later than we think.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
83 mins (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
Watch the original trailer for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Strip a horror movie of its preamble, motivation, characters and backstory and you’re left with the bare-bones nightmare that is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: 83 minutes of indiscriminate violence that wraps up with a jubilant dance on the road. I first saw this in my teens, on a VHS rented from the local hardware shop, and it scared the daylights out of me. I revisited it as an adult, in a spirit of nostalgia, and was promptly wrecked and rendered all over again. It’s simple, it’s brutal, and it doesn’t pause for breath.
Hit the Road
93 mins (Panah Panahi, 2021)
Rayan Sarlak in Hit the Road. Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy
An everyday family takes a trip to the mountains in Panah Panahi’s freewheeling road movie from the Iranian frontline. Panahi’s drama tells one story while simultaneously spinning another. It reveals its characters to be liars and makes us love them all the more. The whole thing amounts to a dazzling model of economy: a film that invites us in and makes us comfortable even as the clock ticks towards midnight and the squabbling travellers prepare to say their goodbyes.
Ellen E Jones
Duck Soup
68 mins (Leo McCarey, 1933)
The Marx brothers’ masterpiece crams a lot of laughs into its 68 minutes – but then silliness this sublime couldn’t sustain for much longer. The hilarity is primarily down to the brothers themselves – Harpo’s mostly mute mischief-making, Chico’s constant stream of Italian-accented inanity and Groucho’s every eyebrow wiggle – but more sophisticated flavours also emerge from the soup pot over time. There’s careful choreography behind the apparent anarchy – most notably in the famous mirror scene – and the once-whimsical plot about international relations in the fictional Freedonia plays more like incisive anti-war satire with every passing year.
Fruitvale Station
85 mins (Ryan Coogler, 2013)
Watch a trailer for Fruitvale Station.
It is just one minute 24 seconds until a gunshot is heard and the screen goes black. The feature debut of Black Panther director Ryan Coogler opens this way, with original cellphone footage of the 2009 police-shooting death of Oscar Grant. What follows is an imaginative reconstruction of Grant’s final 24 hours, made into a warm, involving character study by Michael B Jordan’s central performance. It’s cinematically significant – marking the beginning of Jordan and Coogler’s ongoing collaboration – but has wider significance too, heralding the future impact of cellphone clips in the global BLM movement.
The Killing
85 mins (Stanley Kubrick, 1956)
Photograph: Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy
Kubrick’s reputation for greatness rests mostly on his bum-numbing epics (2001: A Space Odyssey clocks in at 143 minutes, and Barry Lyndon breaks the three-hour barrier), but he also knew how to turn out compact entertainment, like this horse-race heist thriller with hard-boiled dialogue from novelist Jim Thompson. Sterling Hayden’s ex-con is carefully planning that one last job, meaning every minute must be meticulously accounted for. Still, The Killing also finds time for memorable encounters with underworld characters, such asMaurice the philosophical thug, played by Georgian pro wrestler Kola Kwariani.
15 of the best short novels
Anthony Cummins
Minor Detail
Adania Shibli, 120 pages (2020)
Translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, this unforgettable two-part narrative from a Palestinian writer is structured around a formal experiment that raises tough questions of storytelling ethics. The first half, set in the Negev desert in 1949, describes a war crime against nomadic Arabs from an Israeli sergeant’s shockingly unmoved point of view. We then cut to present-day Ramallah, where a woman haunted by a report on the atrocity embarks on a risky cross-country road trip to learn more.
My Phantoms
Gwendoline Riley, 208 pages (2021)
‘Mordantly funny’: Gwendoline Riley. Photograph: Adrian Lourie/Writer Pictures
Riley may be the finest English novelist never to be nominated for the Booker, even if you sense she’s too cool to care. My Phantoms, the most recent of her six books, is also the best, portraying with vodka-shot clarity the terminal phase of a long-frayed mother-daughter bond. Mordantly funny, with a shrewd eye for the subtleties of English class, it shows adulthood as a peculiar psychological torture perpetually pulling its victims between past and present.
In Love
Alfred Hayes, 128 pages (1953)
Hayes was an English-born Hollywood screenwriter whose seven novels include this crisp noir, which unfolds as a barstool confession by a middle-aged Manhattanite filled with remorse over his decision to ditch a divorced dancer, who subsequently said yes to an indecent proposal from a rich businessman. Among admirers of In Love’s bleak allure is Rachel Cusk, for whom the book offers “an amazingly precise representation of what the world looks like if there’s no love in it”.
Hephzibah Anderson
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys, 192 pages (1966)
After publishing a volume of stories and a quartet of short novels, Jean Rhys retreated to Cornwall and fell silent for more than two decades. Her pen didn’t still, however: haunted by the first Mrs Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Rhys compulsively wrote and rewrote what would become her masterpiece. Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Antoinette Cosway, the Creole heiress destined to end her days in Thornfield Hall’s attic. Vibrant, hallucinatory, yet wholly stripped of melodrama, its casual tone contrasts with prose that’s alert and precise, easily matching the power of the capacious novel that nudged it into being.
Hotel du Lac
Anita Brookner, 184 pages (1984)
Over the course of a career that didn’t begin until her 50s, Anita Brookner amassed a backlist of 25 mostly short novels, many of them brilliant. Hotel du Lac, the surprise winner of the 1984 Booker prize, may be her best-known work, but it contains plenty to caution any reader tempted to underestimate its author or her chosen form. Its protagonist is Edith Hope, a romantic novelist who’s travelled to Switzerland in the wake of a messy affair; throughout, genteel elegance and crisp humour parry with isolation and resignation. It’s all rendered with penetrating economy and sensual attention to detail.
Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan, 128 pages (2021)
Keegan’s fourth book and first novel, Small Things Like These is her longest yet. It also happens to be the shortest work ever to be nominated for the Booker prize. Set in small-town Ireland in 1985, it alludes to the Magdalene Laundries scandal, dramatising the inner turmoil that is sparked in coal and timber merchant Bill Furlong by a troubling encounter with a pupil at what is purportedly a girls’ “training school”. As his mind roams back to his own compromised start in life, Keegan’s spare, luminous sentences slice through themes of complicity and courage. A classic in the making.
Abhrajyoti Chakraborty
Territory of Light
Yūko Tsushima, 128 pages (1978-9)
Short novels are incredibly difficult to write. More so when they begin almost imperceptibly, as in Yūko Tsushima’s masterpiece: “The apartment had windows on all sides.” The narrator, a single mother, has moved into a top-floor apartment in Tokyo in the aftermath of a separation. In the mornings, she drops her two-year-old at daycare before hurrying along to her job as an archivist at a local radio station. Territory of Light is a largely plotless novel, nevertheless throbbing with details; the shortest of sentences and paragraphs seem marvellously justified. The protagonist could be describing her dreams and still keep you enchanted.
Afternoon Raag
Amit Chaudhuri, 192 pages (2015)
‘Hallucinatory prose’: Amit Chaudhuri. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian
Early in Amit Chaudhuri’s second novel, the narrator, a Bengali graduate student in Oxford, confesses to vacillating between two lovers – “falling asleep by one woman at night and spending the day with the other”. But it’s more that he is vacillating between two worlds: Oxford and Bombay, where his retired parents live. He remembers the magazine vendor on the street corner next to their apartment building in Bandra, the sound of the rubbish truck every morning, his mother’s recently deceased music teacher smoking on the balcony. The chapters acquire a mysterious velocity by stitching together humdrum moments in hallucinatory prose.
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
Thomas Bernhard, 106 pages (1982)
Inside a Viennese hospital in 1967, two friends are recovering from different ailments. The narrator, named Thomas Bernhard, is recuperating from lung surgery when he learns that his friend, Paul – a relative of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein – has been admitted to the psychiatric ward. You could call this novel a paean to their friendship, except both would disagree. Theirs is a bond forged by a shared antipathy for the countryside, psychiatrists and sentimental tosh, but, more importantly, their fear of death. If they can’t help pitting themselves against everything, it’s because they are only ever in each other’s company, “watching the world go by” on a cafe terrace.
Alex Preston
A Month in the Country
JL Carr, 111 pages (1980)
A dreamlike story set in the fictional village of Oxgodby, JL Carr’s fifth novel is about healing and hope, art and war. Birkin, a damaged veteran of the Great War, comes to the village to restore a 500-year-old mural in the church. With a failed marriage behind him, he immerses himself in his work and in the gentle rhythms of the English countryside in summer. He makes friends with an archaeologist named Moon. He basks in the sun. He falls in love with the vicar’s wife. Slowly, he is healed. As close to heaven as you’ll get in a book.
W, or the Memory of Childhood
Georges Perec, 176 pages (1975)
‘Complex and devastating’: Georges Perec. Photograph: Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
In the afterword of this extraordinary novel-cum-memoir, Perec describes how he constructed the book by knitting together his memories of his mother, who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1943, and a collection of writings from his teenage years, which centred on the fictional island of W, just off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, South America. One of the great novels of the Holocaust, W is a sharp, complex and devastating book about the logic of genocide.
Nightwood
Djuna Barnes, 180 pages (1936)
One of the great modernist novels, Nightwood is a gothic riot of ideas and images, a fever dream of Paris in the roaring twenties. Its two central characters, Nora Flood and Dr Matthew O’Connor, are utterly memorable, but it’s the language that makes this novel a masterpiece. Barnes is the equal of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein in her ability to make new worlds of old words, to develop a rhythm in her writing that continues to pulse in the reader’s mind long after this short book is finished.
Tim Adams
The Mezzanine
Nicholson Baker, 135 pages (1988)
Baker’s unique debut was the epic comedy of one man’s lunch hour, told in real time. As our hero rides mall escalators and makes the crucial decision of which queue to join for his takeaway, he meditates on the big questions – why does one shoelace wear out before the other? Whose genius was behind the everyday origami of the wing-flap milk carton? – and addresses them with the greatest digressive footnotes in all modern literature. Thirty-five years on, it also reads like a poignant period piece: of that age before wandering minds were outsourced to smart phones.
Utz
Bruce Chatwin, 128 pages (1988)
‘Cool irony’: Bruce Chatwin. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer
Though a famous chatterer in person, Chatwin was the sparest of storytellers in print. In this regard, Utz, his brief novel about an obsessive collector of Meissen porcelain – who pursues his passion through long years of pogrom and war and occupation in Prague – is perhaps his definitive book. Written right at the end of the cold war, it examines a Mitteleuropean history in which culture was all but shattered by barbarism. Kaspar Joachim Utz, like his fragile china, is one of that world’s great survivors. With his gift for cool irony, Chatwin begins at his poorly attended funeral.
The Bookshop
Penelope Fitzgerald, 176 pages (1978)
Fitzgerald’s early novel received quite patronising reviews when it appeared. The Guardian suggested it was a slight book “about really nasty people living in a really nice coastal town”. Such responses missed Fitzgerald’s precise gift for dramatising complex moral questions in the most quaintly innocuous of settings. The efforts of Florence Green, a middle-aged widow, to make a new life in an unpromising bookshop in a genteel Suffolk community, becomes a memorable tragicomedy of stifling small-town English cruelties. It also marked the first full expression of Fitzgerald’s perfectly poised satirical voice.
The long list: 10 films and books that deserve to go on and on
Films
Julianne Moore in Magnolia. Photograph: New Line/Allstar
Magnolia
188 mins (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)
A hundred and eighty-eight unmissable minutes of thrillingly intertwined personal relationships, interspersed by an unexpectedly heartbreaking musical interlude in which the disparate cast join in a fractured singalong of Aimee Mann’s Wise Up. I wouldn’t lose a single frame. MK
Gangs of Wasseypur
321 mins (Anurag Kashyap, 2012)
This Hindi-language crime epic clocks up five hours and 21 minutes of demented internecine gang warfare, punctuated by punchy musical interludes. It was divided into two films for UK release, but the experience of watching the picture in its bruising, action-packed entirety is exhilarating. WI
Bertil Guve in Fanny and Alexander. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
Fanny and Alexander
188 mins (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)
The story of Bergman’s warmest, liveliest, most joyful film is actually quite straightforward: a domestic saga in which a bright young widow remarries a cruelly austere bishop, and she and her two children engineer an escape. Busy, abundant and never boring, it’s a multi-course banquet of a movie. GL
Dogville
178 mins (Lars von Trier, 2003)
Everything about Lars von Trier’s small-town saga (the single set; the undressed stage) screams out for a quick treatment, before the conceit starts to grate. Except that the lack of props is the point. It means that there’s nowhere to hide; it leaves everybody exposed. And crawling minute by minute, the film tightens its grip. XB
RRR
182 mins (SS Rajamouli, 2022)
Director SS Rajamouli has thoughtfully provided a 10-minute intermission in his Telugu-language Indian history epic – and you will absolutely need it. This is an otherwise unrelenting onslaught of action, music and bromantic emotional catharsis, with added tigers. EEJ
Novels
2666
Roberto Bolaño, 912 pages (2004)
Bolaño’s posthumously published mega-novel, translated by Natasha Wimmer, starts as campus sex comedy before plunging us into the horrors of Mexican femicide, only to resurface, via Nazi Germany, as a sly pisstake on literary fame. ACu
Middlemarch
George Eliot, 873 pages (1872)
Brevity certainly wasn’t beyond George Eliot – just look at Silas Marner (262 pages). Middlemarch is a book that feels just as long as it needs to be. Even upon rereading, it gives the reader no itchy-fingered cause to skip any portion of its peerless, nearly 900-page portrait of supposedly provincial lives. HA
A House for Mr Biswas
VS Naipaul, 623 pages (1961)
Not once in my multiple re-readings have I skipped a page or wondered about the time. By turns hilarious and tragic, this portrait of a brown man in colonial Trinidad is surely among the marquee achievements of the 20th century. Regardless of your opinion of its prickly author, each page is well worth your time. ACh
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace, 1,079 pages (1996)
A book that has become a meme and a writer posthumously cancelled, it’s not an easy time to champion Infinite Jest. But its length is a critical element of the novel’s formal project. And once you get past the cleverness and the showiness of the language, it is both incredibly moving and wonderfully entertaining. AP
Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann, 731 pages (1901)
There is a near-miraculous quality to Mann’s rendering of the decline of a north German merchant family over four generations. That miracle is compounded by the knowledge that Mann published the book at 26. How did he already know so much about the different ways that individuals strive and love and plan and fail? TA