The Tight-90 Club
Recommendations for quick(er) hits that tell their story well in 90 minutes – more or less. Perfect for when you're pressed for time.
I like long films. There’s a time and a place for switching off from the outside world and surrendering yourself to a movie for 3 hours. And – contrary to what we might expect in this age of short-form video content obliterating everyone’s attention spans – audiences are still up for parking themselves in a cinema seat for longer films. Oppenheimer made more than $900 million this summer. The Batman and Avatar: The Way of Water proved hugely successful despite their 3-hour runtimes. There remains an appetite at the box office for longer works.
For me, though, there is something uniquely appealing about a film that tells its story well, and Takes the Viewer on a Journey, in a shorter space of time. When you’re pressed for time, a film that clocks in at a tight 90 minutes is your greatest friend. These are a few shorter films I’d recommend for such an occasion. A couple of them hover comfortably around the 90-minute mark. One of them is barely longer than an hour. Nothing here is more than 100 minutes, though. A 2-hour film can be ruthlessly efficient in the way it tells its story, sure – but nothing can match the sheer svelte polish of a sub-100-minute movie.
On that note…
Lovers Rock (2020), directed by Steve McQueen – 68 minutes
2020 was surely the best year BBC drama has ever had. Bona fide masterpieces Small Axe, I May Destroy You, and Normal People all appeared on the BBC within the space of a few months, fed to a locked-down population hungrier than ever for quality home entertainment. Sir Steve McQueen’s anthology, consisting as it does of five feature-length films made for TV, stands as a landmark achievement in both television and cinema. A director of documentaries and dramas, a writer, and an artist, McQueen is one of the most versatile filmmakers working today. The fact that he has won both the Turner Prize (in 1999) and an Oscar (in 2014, for 12 Years a Slave) attests to his ability to tell stories across forms, genres, and styles. It’s a versatility he speaks about in his Desert Island Discs interview, which is well worth a listen.
You're led by the idea and what it wants to be, how it wants to represent itself. And sometimes it wants to be a photograph, sometimes it wants to be an artwork, [...] sometimes it wants to be a narrative feature film. Steve McQueen on working across forms (Desert Island Discs, 2014)
And it’s a versatility that extends to the balance of genres and tones on display within McQueen’s Small Axe, which tells stories from London’s West Indian community, stretching from the late 1960s to the early ’ 80s. Positioned between the courtroom drama Mangrove and the biopic Red, White and Blue, this second instalment – Lovers Rock – is an explosion of music, dance, and romance.
Co-written by McQueen and Courttia Newland, Lovers Rock depicts the budding romance between Franklyn (Micheal Ward) and Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn), who meet at a blues party in Ladbroke Grove in 1980. The film is light on plot but heavy on atmosphere and style – two scenes in particular stand out. In the first, Janet Kay’s 1979 hit ‘Silly Games’ plays in full under a deliriously sensual couples dance. When the song ends, the dancers continue to sing it a cappella. It’s breathtaking. In the second, McQueen whips us around the dancefloor as partygoers let loose with furious energy to The Revolutionaries’ ‘Kunta Kinte’.
Lovers Rock is tempered by moments of darkness, but the film is primarily concerned with realising one magical evening of shared joy. It entirely succeeds.
Shiva Baby (2020), directed by Emma Seligman – 77 minutes
Writer-director Emma Seligman’s debut feature expands upon her 2018 short of the same name. College student Danielle (Rachel Sennott) attends a family shiva (a Jewish observance of mourning following a burial) with her parents. There, she must navigate an onslaught of relatives interrogating her about her job prospects, as well as an awkward reunion with her ex-girlfriend Maya (Molly Gordon). Oh, and it turns out her sugar daddy is in attendance. With his wife and child in tow.
'You look like Gwyneth Paltrow on food stamps – and not in a good way.'
Seligman walks us through the chaos that ensues, to hilarious/cringe-inducing/deeply painful effect. Shiva Baby is a 77-minute long anxiety attack funny, excruciating, and surprisingly tender. Ariel Marx’s score, with its stabs of discordant, Psycho-like strings, only adds further spiky potency to the rising wave of panic the film rides. You’ll probably breathe a sigh of relief when it’s all over – but, like, in a good way.
Palm Springs (2020), directed by Max Barbakow – 90 minutes
Barbakow and a sparky cast have a lot of fun with this take on the Groundhog Day formula, in which the time loop is repackaged as a shared experience. Nyles (Andy Samberg) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti) meet at a wedding in a luxury desert resort, and find themselves trapped together in an endlessly repeating cycle, reliving the day of the nuptials over and over.
I love this film – it’s very funny, clever, and surprisingly affecting. Samberg and Milioti have great chemistry, and the rest of the cast are excellent (J.K. Simmons looks to be having the time of his life as the murderous Roy). For me, this is the pick of the bunch when it comes to the clutch of timey-wimey romcoms that have emerged post-Groundhog Day (About Time, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and co).
Once (2007), directed by John Carney – 85 minutes
Once Upon a Time... in Dublin, an Irish busker (Glen Hansard) met a Czech pianist (Markéta Irglová) and everything turned just a little bit magical.
John Carney’s heartbreaking musical romance charts the blossoming relationship between the two unnamed musicians. She helps him to put together a demo to send to producers in London, and with her support his dreams of musical success begin to seem less and less far-fetched.
Once is like an indie-folk, Emerald-Isle La La Land, made on a shoestring and released to glowing reviews and surprise commercial success. Its soundtrack, including the Oscar-winning ‘Falling Slowly’, is wonderful. It is, in short, a (short) delight.
In the Mood for Love (2000), directed by Wong Kar-wai – 98 minutes
Wong Kar-wai’s mesmerising romance – a critical darling and regular fixture of best-film-evs lists – is one of those movies you think can’t possibly be as good as everyone says. Then you watch it and realise it might be even better.
Set in Hong Kong in 1962, it traces the growing affection between neighbours Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) and Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung). It’s an achingly beautiful film – at times very funny, but suffused with unvoiced emotion and unexpressed longing. Rarely has a film sent shivers down my spine the way this one does every time ‘Yumeji's Theme’ floats in and the action shifts to slow-mo.
The Dead (1987), directed by John Huston – 83 minutes
Is James Joyce’s minor masterpiece The Dead (1914) the greatest short story ever written? I think it certainly ends with one of the greatest paragraphs ever written. In John Huston’s film adaptation, that paragraph appears almost verbatim, in voiceover as an interior monologue. Huston knew that transposing those closing sentences into action or dialogue could never hope to match the beauty of Joyce’s words.
The staging of that final passage is emblematic of the unwaveringly faithful approach Huston takes throughout the film. It’s a far cry from Eric Heisserer’s extensive reworking of ‘Story of Your Life’ in his script for Arrival, and Huston’s faithfulness may disappoint those who prefer literary adaptations to take greater risks with their source material. For me, though, this film works because it doesn’t just translate to the screen the events and dialogue of The Dead; it succeeds in evoking the distinctive atmosphere of Joyce’s story, its wintry melancholy and enchanting mystery.
The performances are really good, particularly Donal McCann as Gabriel Conroy and Anjelica Huston as his wife, Gretta. The scene where Gabriel sees Gretta standing on the stairway in the darkness is beautifully realised. Translation to the screen does mean that we lose Joyce’s free indirect style, and with it a lot of the insight we get into Gabriel’s narcissistic character in the story. McCann’s tetchy mannerisms can’t quite make up for that, but his delivery of the final voiceover is note-perfect.
Huston was in ill health and approaching the end of his life when he directed The Dead, running the set, as Pauline Kael put it, ‘from a wheelchair, jumping up to look through the camera, with oxygen tubes trailing from his nose to a portable generator’. Evidently a passion project, this film serves just as well as a beguiling work in its own right as it does an interesting case study of the limits of literary adaptation.
Wild Strawberries (1957), directed by Ingmar Bergman – 91 minutes
You think you’re watching a quirky road-trip comedy about a cranky professor and his daughter-in-law, and then you’re plunged into something much deeper, more moving, and puzzling. Bergman’s film is a haunting exploration of memory, loss, and regret, with a tremendous central performance from Victor Sjöström.
The remarkable thing about Wild Strawberries is just how much longer it feels - in a good way - than its brief runtime. The film is only 91 minutes, but seems to contain whole galaxies.
It’s a masterly tight-90, and a good one to end the list on.