10 Amazing Movies Over Three Hours Long

5. The Deer Hunter

Lord Of The Rings Return Of The King Aragorn
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 almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.