3) Django Unchained
Much ado was made about how long the runtimes of last year’s Oscar contending movies were, with the likes of Lincoln, Les Misérables, Life of Pi and Zero Dark Thirty taking their share of criticism for apparently not making their minute count of utmost concern. The film that took the bulk of the runtime-bashing, though, was Django Unchained, for its 165-minute duration.
This one I can sympathize with a little bit more. I understand the people who complained about the movie having several endings, and I have yet to encounter someone who thought the scene where Tarantino himself shows up actually worked. Some have pointed to the loss of his longtime editor, Sally Menke, as perhaps a contributing factor to the relative untidiness towards the end of the film, although it’s always virtually impossible to evaluate editing from an outsider’s perspective.
So I agree that it may lack the tightness and flow of Inglourious Basterds or his previous work, and yet Django contains such terrific moments from beginning to end that its nearly 3 hours of content hasn’t really bothered me in any of my viewings. It is, after all, a kind of Western superhero origin story, and Django’s odyssey requires a bit of space to breathe, to feel the exhaustion of his journey, which adds to the satisfaction of the vengeful ending.