The 10 Best Movies That Are Under 70 Minutes Long, Ranked

It’s Such a Beautiful Day is about everything, and it manages to be about everything in about 62 minutes. If you want some more specificity, it’s about the human condition, and one man facing his mortality. That sounds morbid, and It’s Such a Beautiful Day, yet the film’s also a comedy to some extent, or is at least willing to be about as funny as it is soul-crushing.

It’s the sort of thing that can truly reshape your outlook on the world and some of your own feelings about your life and mortality, which sounds hyperbolic, but It’s Such a Beautiful Day is something special. It’s also got one of the best endings of its time, or maybe of all time, so you will inevitably be rewarded for the (again, short) amount of time you spend on this one.

It’s pretty amazing what Sherlock Jr. manages to pack into such a short runtime. It’s even shorter than all the other movies being mentioned here, since it takes only about three-quarters of an hour to get through, yet it’s a quality over quantity kind of thing, since all the action scenes, comedic moments, and instances of stunt work here make the whole thing remarkable, short runtime be damned.

Maybe The General is more impressive and epic, as a Buster Keaton film, but that one’s comparatively epic in length, at 79 minutes all up. So, Sherlock Jr. is the one worth mentioning here. The plot here doesn’t really matter, since it’s just about a film projectionist day-dreaming and trying to be an amateur detective, but what little story is here proves to be enough, and a good excuse to have some creative and ahead-of-their-time action sequences.

By the standards of modern-day cinema, The Unknown might not be too unnerving, but for a silent movie and something close to 100 years old, it is impressively and admirably intense. The plot here involves a criminal on the run who joins a circus and poses as a man without arms to try to evade those after him, but then he falls for a woman who was already part of said circus.

And then there’s some romantic melodrama that unfolds, but The Unknown is mostly a thriller, and maybe kind of a horror film, too, but in a more grounded way than most silent horror films (like the original Nosferatu or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). It’s forward-thinking as a psychological thriller/horror sort of thing, and much of it holds up better than you might expect.

Sure, Charlie Chaplin would later star in and direct some movies even better than The Kid, but The Kid was his first full-on masterpiece, at least out of his films that were feature-length. Here, that feature-length runtime is only just achieved, yet the narrative is simple, so that ends up being okay. It’s really just about Chaplin’s Tramp character caring for a child after the kid’s mother abandons him.

And later, the mother changes her mind, and so the more comedic parts of the movie give way to drama, and it’s genuinely quite touching and heartbreaking in parts. Even without the brief runtime, The Kid is up there among the most approachable and easy-to-enjoy silent films; a real gateway sort of one, in effect, if you’ve not watched too many movies that are more than 100 years old before.

Seriously delivering as a heist movie, Armored Car Robbery just hits all the basics of such a film within a runtime of only a little over an hour, so it’s sort of the opposite of Heat, which is almost three hours. Actually, Heat is amazing. Heat shows you can do a heist movie on an epic scale, but then Armored Car Robbery shows you can also do it within a runtime that’s barely feature-length.

This would usually be the part where one would explain the plot, but Armored Car Robbery is about what you'd expect it to be, based on that title, so not much else really needs to be said. It’s also sort of a film noir flick, and one of the more underrated ones of its era. When you only need to devote about an hour of your time, what do you really have to lose by giving this underrated (and kind of forgotten) film a shot?

The Adventures of Prince Achmed is a must-watch if you're big into animation, or interested in the medium and its history, since it’s one of the earliest outright great animated movies. Beyond it being groundbreaking, it’s also just genuinely quite inventive and enjoyable to watch for such an old movie, being an adaptation of some stories from One Thousand and One Nights, which is sometimes referred to as The Arabian Nights.

And, sure, the animation style here is very old-fashioned, or maybe even primitive compared to what movies would be capable of a decade or two later (looking at you, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), but for 1926, this is honestly pretty cool. There’s so much done here with silhouettes and 2D animation, and you can also appreciate The Adventures of Prince Achmed paving the way for further animated fairy tales to come.

You can’t go wrong with too many Marx Brothers movies, including the ones with titles that Queen later used for two of their albums: A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. But both of those are too long to be included here, so Duck Soup is being highlighted instead. And, in any event, Duck Soup might well be even better than either of those two later (and longer) Marx Brothers films.

Or, put another way, Duck Soup is the ideal starting point if you want to see what all the fuss was about regarding Groucho, Harpo, and Chico. Oh, and Zeppo. Sure, Zeppo. Can't forget about him... or can you? There’s a farcical plot here involving a fictional country and a war, kind of, but everything is an excuse for gags, and that’s enough, because there are so many gags in Duck Soup, and most of them are very funny. Quantity is highlighted, but the quality is there and accounted for, too.

There are a couple of obvious things to observe about Mirrored Mind, but explaining what it does on a narrative level proves to be a good deal more difficult. So, let’s get obvious. For one, Mirrored Mind is tremendously heavy-going, as a film. It’s sort of about an actress going through some things, and escaping into a fantastical realm of sorts. Sort of.

It’s also an arthouse film in so many ways, and so that whole attempt at a summary, even a short one, only goes so far. Pretentious as it might sound, Mirrored Mind is an experience and a pretty intriguing/gripping one, so long as you're willing to go along with it. There’s a lot here that can be felt on a rather deep level, in terms of how it explores depression and some other heavy-going things, so it’s pretty underrated and ultimately striking, truth be told.

The extent to which Chronopolis is abstract and weird is honestly pretty admirable. Picture Metropolis but animated, about a third of the length, and without much by way of traditional conflict. The emphasis here is on a group of beings that seem to live in some sort of utopian society, but there’s nothing much to do, and so it’s not very utopian in the traditional or admirable sense.

They sort of just exist and do things that seem alien, and then there are also a few outsiders exploring the strange realm/city these beings exist in, but even then, the inclusion of those people doesn’t go very far toward giving Chronopolis an actual plot. It’s cool, though, if you're willing to just go with all the weirdness of a movie like this for 50-ish minutes.

Following is easily the most obscure of all the Christopher Nolan movies, probably because it’s his first and, arguably, also his least impressive. It’s a far cry from Oppenheimer and The Dark Knight, in other words, but still very much worth watching if you dig those movies and other works Nolan has directed, especially if you're into the more twist-filled and psychologically tense films Christopher Nolan’s helmed.

Trying to summarize what happens here is difficult, which is interesting when there are only so many events that can happen when you're working with a runtime of only 69 minutes, but it’s all a bit Alfred Hitchcock-y, albeit grittier and more low-budget than the typical Hitchcock film. It’s sort of about people-watching/following and the way one’s life can be entirely uprooted if you run into the wrong (or the right?) person. It’s a neat film. It does quite a lot with a little.