There is something truly mesmerizing about a single shot in a movie spread out over minutes, or even in some rare cases hours. It is the ultimate way to completely immerse the audience in the world of a film. After about thirty seconds, the viewer feels like a fly on the wall or even a witness in the film itself.

For some directors, it is all about the length of the take. Several movies are either done in one complete take or are staged to seem like a single take that doesn’t break up the action of the film for even one second. Then other directors prefer to give a quick burst of a world in several sustained minutes. This is often a whirlwind tour of a setting to get you fully immersed in a short period of time. Here are ten of the absolute best long takes ever filmed.

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10 GoodFellas - Three Minutes

There’s no way to talk about the long take without talking about Martin Scorsese’s seminal gangster film GoodFellas. That film features one of the most famous long takes of all time. We watch without a moment’s break as Linda is pulled into her boyfriend Henry’s glitzy gangster world full of eccentric characters, glamorous locales, and unflinching respect.

MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY

MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY

MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY

This take may only be three minutes, but its sweeping cinematography is essential for the rest of the film. This fairytale moment where Linda is utterly charmed by Henry’s criminal life is vital for the entire rest of the film where she has to put up with violence, affairs, police and constant chaos. She is so taken in by that three-minute fairytale that it takes her most of the film to finally reach her breaking point. It’s hard to blame her.

9 Creed - Four Minutes

     Waner Bros. Pictures

Creed is the rare spin-off of a true Hollywood classic that not only lives up to the original, but in some ways surpasses it. That is largely thanks to Michael B. Jordan’s visceral turn as Adonis Creed alongside Sylvester Stallone’s returning Rocky Balboa. One way in which the film truly stood apart from the rest of the Rocky is by featuring an uninterrupted four minutes in the ring.

Both director Ryan Coogler and Jordan himself prove that neither the Creed spin-off franchise nor the new fighter Adonis are simply retreads of what Rocky did in 1976. The visceral way that this shot goes through each and every round, making us feel every dodge and every hit was what hooked the whole world on this new Creed franchise.

8 Atonement - Five and a half Minutes

     Relativity Media

Several films have dramatized the harrowing experiences of British soldiers during the Dunkirk incident in World War II. While Christopher Nolan and Leslie Norman both provided iconic takes on the horrifying ordeal, Joe Wright may have filmed the definitive version with his long-take during the film Atonement. The five and a half minute tour through the real-life scene proved to be the most immersive part of the entire film.

The team had to rehearse the entire sequence for two days to make it go perfectly. It stands as one of the greatest World War II scenes ever put to film, rivaling those in Saving Private Ryan, The Great Escape and The Thin Red Line. In retrospect, it gives the film’s ultimately tragic ending so much more bite knowing what the characters had to live through.

7 Children of Men - Six Minutes

     Universal Pictures

Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men depicts a brutal world where fertility rates have fallen to catastrophic lows. This harrowing world is depicted best during several long-takes that take us through unblinking action sequences, tragic scenes, and graphic depictions of violence. The longest sequence in question lasts over six minutes. Six minutes where the audience was unlikely to so much as blink as the tension mounted to grizzly heights. It is definitely not a comforting watch, even if it is a brilliantly shot one.

While this film is no doubt a classic, its bleak tone and relentless sequences of action have made it on several people’s “will never watch again” lists. Regardless, the film is no doubt memorable, even if it is usually only watched the one time.

6 1917 - Eight Minutes

     Dreamworks

There are many war movies out there that have expertly recreated the tension and horror of enormous armed conflicts. Perhaps none are as terrifying and immersive as 1917 from director Sam Mendes. The movie is filmed to seem like one continuous shot through the mission of two young men simply trying to deliver a message. It features an eight minute long-take that was so stressful and complicated that several actors lamented that they had to wait for the take to be restarted again and again before they even got a chance to do their part. No one said the long-take game was easy.

5 Extraction - Twelve Minutes

     Netflix

Netflix has been well known in the world of the long take for years now, largely thanks to Daredevil and its huge hallway fight set pieces. So when it came time for one of their films to try to up the ante for the streaming service, Chris Hemsworth, director Sam Hargrave, and the producing Russo brothers proved themselves more than up to the task with Extraction.

The scene in question features a staggering twelve minutes that takes us through a car crash, several gunfights, a chase through an apartment building, and finally Chris Hemsworth falling off of a building into a knife fight with Randeep Hooda. It is one of those action sequences that demands you rewind it immediately to watch again.

4 Birdman - Fifteen Minutes

     Fox Searchlight Pictures

Just as it’s impossible to talk about long takes without mentioning GoodFellas, it is equally impossible to leave out Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s masterpiece Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). The film’s opening fifteen minutes features and uninterrupted tour through the theater the film’s set in, the characters involved in the production and most importantly the deteriorating mental state of Michael Keaton’s Riggan told through magical realism.

While the whirlwind tour of the gangster world in GoodFellas may have sold us all on the glitz and glamour of the gangster world, Birdman’s tour showed us just how shaky the foundation of both Riggan’s Broadway career and his sanity were before most films have even introduced all the principal characters. There’s no denying that tragedy will strike once the first cut notably breaks the tension for the first time.

3 Gravity - Seventeen Minutes

     Warner Bros.

Alfonso Cuarón returns to the long-take world with his extremely stressful seventeen-minute shot while Sandra Bullock’s astronaut character tries to save her own life as the lack of gravity in space sends her spinning noiselessly into the void. It’s a truly gripping, horrifying scene that was so difficult to shoot that Robert Downey Jr. actually had to drop out in favor of George Clooney because it was simply too much.

While most films that use long takes like this are praised for the technique endlessly, Gravity may have proved to be too effective. The scene was so immersive that many viewers actually had to leave the theater to get sick or turn their heads away to avoid getting a headache. It caused a huge controversy that mired a lot of enthusiasm for the film. Though this may have been exactly what Cuarón wanted to happen. No one could say the scene wasn’t effective.

2 Boiling Point - Ninety-Two Minutes

     Vertigo Releasing

Perhaps the most impressive long-takes of the last few years is the film Boiling Point. The in-depth look into the stressful world of running a five-star restaurant was shot in one ninety-two minute take, one of the longest ever put to film. The camera closely follows Stephen Graham’s head chef as he slowly reaches his boiling point as the title suggests. It also gives brief glimpses into the lives of the line cooks, managers, bakers, servers, dishwashers and customers who exist in the world alongside Graham. It makes the entire world feel so real that the audience could practically walk into the restaurant and order a meal. Not that they would likely want to by the time the credits roll.

What makes this achievement all the more impressive is that it was filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Getting a huge cast of people to work in perfect synchronicity for over an hour and a half is hard. Having them do so during the rough restrictions of filming during a pandemic is downright miraculous.

1 Russian Ark - Ninety-Six Minutes

     Wellspring Media

The film that holds the record for longest unbroken shot is likely the film on this list that audiences will be the least familiar with. Aleksandr Sokurov’s seminal Russian film, Russian Ark. The entire movie is filmed in one, unbroken, ninety-six minute shot. Both the cinematographic feat Sokurov manages to pull off and the plot of the film itself have made Russian Ark into one of the most famous Russian films of all time. Considering how hard the film was to make, at least it was worth it.

Making this film proved to be a Herculean undertaking that very nearly didn’t come together. The first three attempts to shoot the film failed due to technical difficulties. Luckily, the team managed to pull it off in the fourth attempt, which is the one used for the finished film. The rest is history.