10 Amazing Movies Over Three Hours Long

5. The Deer Hunter

The Deer Hunter Christopher Walken
Universal

Runtime: 3 hours 3 minutes

Though director Michael Cimino fell from grace with the abysmal Heaven's Gate two years later, 1978's The Deer Hunter is proof that he does have the ability to tell a punchy, knuckle-whitening story, something he couldn't quite tap into while making its bloated, messy followup.

The Deer Hunter follows a group of small-town, working class folk whose lives are forever changed by the Vietnam War. It's a very long movie, but because it's able to pack in numerous prolonged sequences of tension - the Russian Roulette scenes among them - there's always something compelling onscreen to hold your attention, all the way up to the ending credits.

It's not necessarily "enjoyable" viewing, and its characters occasionally feel like caricatures, but it's incredibly moving, and the intensity of Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken's performances is stunningly powerful.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!