The Best Movies All Have One Thing In Common

Over the past several weeks, I’ve made a deliberate decision to watch movies that have runtimes as close to 90 minutes as humanly possible, and my takeaway is that this is the perfect runtime for most feature-length films. Most movies at this length have a clear three-act structure, with each act clocking in at around 30 minutes, and this is the kind of pacing that I can get behind. The story introduces conflict within its first 30 minutes, followed by 30 minutes of rising action, which then leads to a 30-minute climax and resolution. 

Among the movies I watched that barely exceed 90 minutes, 1988’s Pulse is an excellent example of how efficiently a story can escalate without wasting any time. 

In the first act of Pulse, David adjusts to a new family dynamic while spending the summer with his father and stepmother but also suspects something strange is happening with the electronics in their house. In the second act, he confirms something strange (and dangerous) is happening, but nobody believes him. By the time Pulse approaches its third act, everybody believes David, but they should have listened to him sooner. 

Movies like Pulse, which is around 90 minutes long, have zero fat, and that’s why I love them. If the movie is awful, I didn’t waste a lot of time arriving at that conclusion; I could cut my losses and move on. 

You may have your doubts about the low-budget independent sci-fi horror movie that I used as an example, so let’s break down something that’s universally loved. 1980’s Airplane has a 97 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes. Can you guess how long it is? Like most movies that I prefer to watch, it’s just shy of 90 minutes. 

In Airplane, the plane goes up in the first act, has problems in the second act, and crashes in the third act. It’s not just the runtime and simplicity of Airplane’s premise that makes it such a great movie, but how this runtime is used. You can reliably look at your watch while watching Airplane and know when its humor and tone are about to shift based on this three-act structure. 

Breaking away from the three-act structure, Alone, which I recently watched on Netflix, is one of those movies that establishes a five-act structure across just over 90 minutes. In this abduction tale, each of the five acts (The Road, The River, The Rain, The Night, and The Clearing) runs between 15 and 20 minutes and gradually escalates to a logical conclusion. An entire story is told at a relentless pace, but the narrative is broken up in a way that allows you to gather your senses and process what you just watched. 

I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I’d be a bigger fan of the MCU if the films had a runtime closer to 90 minutes. After blasting through every single MCU film in a matter of months, I have such a strong case of superhero fatigue that I don’t think I’ll ever recover from it. I attribute my lack of enthusiasm for superhero movies to the fact that most of these movies take up all of my free time to watch, and lately, they’ve been hit or miss.

I’m not saying that lengthier films like Oppenheimer or Titanic don’t have their rightful place in cinema because they do. But if I had to choose between movies that are 90 minutes or three hours long, I’m going for the tight, three-act structure that 90 minutes has to offer because that’s about as much escapism as I could handle in a single sitting.