Top up your watchlist… 17 very long films

Director: Jean-Jacques Beineix

Jean-Jacques Beineix’s story of a volatile, highly sexual relationship was one of the most successful French films of the 1980s.

You’ll need… 3 hours 5 mins

Director: Jacques Rivette

Jacques Rivette’s exhilarating combination of theatricality, paranoia and ‘la vie Parisienne’ follows two young women as they enter a mysterious realm upon eating a magic sweet.

You’ll need… 3 hours 14 mins

Director: Bill Douglas

Bill Douglas’s epic story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, six Dorset labourers deported to Australia in the 1830s for forming a trade union.

You’ll need… 3 hours 2 mins

Director: Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway’s epic first feature, constructed as an excerpt from an imagined, filmic directory listing everyone affected by VUE – the Violent Unknown Event.

You’ll need… 3 hours 15 mins

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Bergman’s magisterial and sumptuous portrait of an early 20th-century Swedish family.

You’ll need… 3 hours 1 min

Director: Masaki Kobayashi

This stunningly beautiful anthology of Japanese ghost stories is one of the most meticulously crafted supernatural films ever made.

You’ll need… 3 hours 3 mins

Director: Abel Gance

One of the most magnificent spectacles in all cinema, Abel Gance’s silent epic features full-scale historical recreations of episodes from Napoleon’s personal and political life.

You’ll need… 5 hours 33 mins

Director: Lav Diaz

Lav Diaz’s epic drama follows the contrasting stories of two men: a law school dropout who descends into criminality and the humble family man wrongly accused of his crimes.

You’ll need… 4 hours 10 mins

Director: Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese’s two-part love letter to Italian cinema is epic and sprawling in scope but also a deeply personal and moving testament to his passion for film.

You’ll need… 4 hours 6 mins

Director: Martin Scorsese

Only slightly shorter than his ode to Italian cinema, this is Scorsese’s epic history of American film, tackling the studio system past and present, technique and directors including Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes.

You’ll need… 3 hours 45 mins

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Kurosawa’s poignant, episodic story of a 19th-century doctor (Toshiro Mifune) working in a clinic for the poor, and his tumultuous friendship with a young intern.

You’ll need… 3 hours

Director: Luchino Visconti

Italian maestro Luchino Visconti’s epic drama follows a mother and her five sons who move from a small town to Milan, changing their lives forever.

You’ll need… 2 hours 59 mins

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Farmers hire a band of samurai to defend them against marauding bandits in Kurosawa’s influential epic, a touchstone for action movies ever since.

You’ll need… 3 hours 27 mins

Director: Claude Lanzmann

Claude Lanzmann’s monumental chronicle of the Holocaust has been acclaimed by many as the greatest documentary ever made.

You’ll need… 9 hours 27 mins

Director: King Hu

King Hu’s epic swordplay saga combines ghost story, martial arts mastery and Buddhist mythology to stunning, hypnotic effect.

You’ll need… 2 hours 59 mins

Director: Ermanno Olmi

Ermanno Olmi’s Palme d’Or-winner, about the hardships faced by peasants in late 19th-century Lombardy, is a masterpiece of neorealism.

You’ll need… 3 hours 6 mins

Director: Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang’s second silent sci-fi classic after Metropolis (1927) is a space exploration saga about scheming scientists searching for gold on the moon.

You’ll need… 2 hours 50 mins