The Ninety-Minute Movie Is the Craft Format and Everyone Forgot

In 2024, Sorry, Baby ran 89 minutes. Hundreds of Beavers ran 108. Didi ran 93. In a Violent Nature ran 93. Hit Man ran 115. None of these films felt short. All of them felt complete. Most of them were, minute-for-minute, more precisely constructed than the 180-minute prestige releases they were competing against for critical attention.

The long film is having a real moment, and Lena has written about why. I want to make the opposite argument in a specific register: the 90-minute film is the craft format, most directors who make a 90-minute film are making a better film than they would at 180, and the industry has quietly stopped valuing the specific discipline that the short running time requires.

What the short form demands

A film that runs 90 minutes has, on average, 85 to 95 scenes. Every scene has to do specific work. There is no room for the pickup scene, the restating scene, the mood-establishing scene that does not also advance plot or character. A minute of screen time on a 90-minute film is roughly 1.1 percent of the total. On a 180-minute film, the same minute is 0.55 percent. The specific budget of attention the short film has to work with is half.

This constraint forces discipline. The screenwriter has to know what the film is about and cannot afford to hedge. The editor has to cut aggressively and specifically. The director has to stage scenes so that they deliver multiple simultaneous pieces of information (character, plot, tone) rather than separating those functions into distinct scenes. The short film is, structurally, harder to write and harder to edit than the long film. The craft payload per minute is substantially higher.

When it works, the result is a specific sensation the long film almost never produces: the sensation of a film in which nothing is wasted, every choice is load-bearing, and the ending arrives exactly when it should.

The 2024-25 cases

Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby (2024, 89 minutes). The film is structured in a specific non-linear way, with chapters labelled by year, that lets it tell a story about trauma and its specific aftermaths without stretching the running time. Every chapter does specific emotional work. The film ends when it has said what it needed to say. The running time is, structurally, the film’s specific argument: the trauma is not a long film because the trauma is not the point, the recovery is the point, and the recovery is something you live rather than watch.

Mike Cheslik’s Hundreds of Beavers (2024, 108 minutes). The film is a silent slapstick comedy with no dialogue and an aesthetic of hand-built absurdity. The running time is slightly over the 90-minute line but the construction is aggressive in the craft sense I am describing. The film does not contain a single wasted shot. Every sequence is structurally motivated. The ambition is contained in the form.

Sean Wang’s Didi (2024, 93 minutes). A coming-of-age film about a specific thirteen-year-old in 2008 Fremont, California. The film is precisely calibrated to the length of a specific summer. Events build, culminate, resolve. The running time is exactly what the material needs. The film ends with the protagonist starting high school. To run longer would be to make a different film.

Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature (2024, 93 minutes). A slasher film restaged as slow-cinema genre experiment, with the killer as the specific point-of-view character across the film’s running time. The film is, in part, an experiment in what happens when horror is removed from the tempo that audiences expect. It is 93 minutes because 93 minutes is what the experiment requires. A longer version of the same film would be an exhausting version.

Richard Linklater’s Hit Man (2024, 115 minutes). Slightly longer than the strict 90-minute pocket but the same specific discipline applies. The film is a romantic comedy with a specific structural premise (Gary Johnson becomes a fake hit man, meets Madison, plays a specific role to seduce her) that the running time is precisely scaled to explore. Linklater has made three-hour films. He chose to make this one 115 minutes because the material required that length.

What happens when the long film copies the short film’s ambitions

The long-film trend has produced some genuine achievements. The Brutalist, Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, each uses its running time for specific dramatic purposes that shorter films cannot achieve.

It has also produced, increasingly, long films where length is padding rather than substance. Babylon at 189 minutes is a 130-minute film with 60 minutes of peripheral material. Megalopolis at 138 minutes is a 95-minute film whose ambitions exceed its execution. Argylle at 139 minutes is a 105-minute film whose plot genuinely does not support the additional time. I am not going to keep listing examples because the pattern is obvious to anyone paying attention.

The long-film trend has legitimised length as a prestige signifier. Directors who would previously have cut a film to 95 minutes are now, consciously or not, delivering 135-minute cuts that are not structurally better films. The additional time is prestige signalling rather than craft.

What the short film does that the long film cannot

Some specific things are better at 90 minutes than at 180.

Tonal control. A tonally specific film (a slasher, a romantic comedy, a chamber drama, an absurdist comedy) can maintain its tone across 90 minutes. Across 180 minutes, almost any tone will drift. The drift is sometimes a feature (Scorsese’s three-hour films play multiple registers productively), but it is often a bug. A 90-minute film in a specific register commits to that register and delivers it.

Specific character portraits. A film about a single character going through a specific experience can be delivered at 90 minutes with precision. Didi is 93 minutes specifically because the film is about the specific experience of a specific summer. Adding time would require adding material that is not about that specific experience.

Single-concept premises. A film built around a single conceptual hook (Hit Man, In a Violent Nature, Hundreds of Beavers) works best at the length that lets the hook develop without repeating itself. 90 minutes is usually that length.

What would restore the short form

The industry needs to stop treating running time as a prestige variable. A 90-minute film is not a lesser film; it is a film of specific duration, often made with more craft per minute than its 180-minute peers. The specific financial reward for long films (more Oscar nominations, longer festival buzz, more prestige-signalling in the marketing) is producing artificial length where shorter work would be better.

Distributors should also stop treating 90-minute films as commercial liabilities. The 90-minute film plays more daily showings, finishes before dinner, and can be rewatched by viewers who discovered they liked it. A disciplined 90-minute film is a specific commercial asset. Theatres used to understand this. The streaming-era preference for length has clouded the accounting.

Finally, film criticism needs to stop treating long films as more serious. Sorry, Baby is a more tightly-constructed film than Megalopolis. The running time is not the variable that determines seriousness. The craft is.

What I am watching for

I am watching for the specific young directors who are going to make 90-minute films with the confidence to let them stay 90 minutes. Victor, Wang, Nash, and others in their specific cohort are already doing this. I want the next generation of major-studio work to include more of this discipline, not less.

The long film will keep making its case, and some of the cases will be good ones. The short film needs its own advocates. Consider this one of them. A well-made 90-minute film is one of the hardest things cinema can make. The fact that the form is still being practiced at all, against the prevailing industrial pressure toward length, is a minor miracle. It deserves more attention than it is currently getting.