Best Movies Under 90 Minutes for a Quick Night In

Here's the pitch: two guys strangle their friend, hide the body in a trunk, and then host a dinner party for the victim's family over it. James Stewart plays their old teacher who slowly figures out what happened.

The whole thing was filmed to look like one unbroken take. Hitchcock shot it in ten-minute reels and hid the cuts, which sounds like a gimmick but genuinely makes the movie feel suffocating. You are stuck in that apartment with these people for 80 minutes and there is nowhere to go.

If you've never seen Hitchcock and want to start somewhere compact, this is it.

Rob Reiner directed a fake documentary about a fictional heavy metal band on a disastrous comeback tour. Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer play the band members — all three co-wrote the script, and most of the dialogue was improvised.

It is one of the funniest movies ever made. It also essentially invented the modern mockumentary. The scene with the amp that goes to 11 is famous enough that "up to eleven" became a real phrase in the English language, which is a wild legacy for an 82-minute comedy.

Don't worry if you know nothing about heavy metal. That's actually the ideal viewing condition.

Four boys in small-town Oregon walk through the woods to find a dead body. Stephen King wrote the novella. Rob Reiner directed the film. River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O'Connell play the kids.

It sounds grim but it isn't. This is genuinely one of the best coming-of-age movies ever made — funny, sad, and honest about what friendship feels like at 12. The ending hits differently depending on how old you are when you watch it.

The 89-minute runtime means it barely has room to drag. It doesn't.

Yes, it counts. 88 minutes. The Lion King has Hans Zimmer's entire score, Jeremy Irons as a villain, James Earl Jones as Mufasa, and a Shakespeare plot that holds up completely — and it's done in under 90 minutes.

The opening five minutes are still among the best five minutes in any movie from the 90s. If you haven't watched it as an adult, it hits very differently than you remember.

The first fully computer-animated feature film and it's 81 minutes. Pixar made a complete movie, with a real arc and a real villain and actual stakes, in the time it takes to watch two episodes of a prestige drama.

Tom Hanks voices Woody the cowboy, Tim Allen voices Buzz Lightyear, and the conflict between them — ego vs insecurity, obsolescence vs novelty — is more interesting than most adult films bother to be. It doesn't talk down to kids and it doesn't wink at adults. It's just good.

A German woman (Franka Potente) has 20 minutes to find 100,000 Deutschmarks and deliver them to her boyfriend before a crime boss kills him. The movie shows you what happens three times, with small changes each time, and each version ends differently.

It runs on techno music, pure kinetic energy, and the idea that tiny choices compound into totally different lives. Director Tom Tykwer made a movie that feels like a video game and a philosophical thought experiment simultaneously. At 81 minutes it never overstays its welcome. Somehow every viewing still feels fast.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walk around Paris for 80 minutes and talk. That's it. You don't technically need to have seen Before Sunrise (1995) first, but you'll feel the weight of their nine-year gap more if you have.

One of the most romantic films ever made. Genuinely. It's also weirdly tense — both characters are running out of time and both of them know it. Richard Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy co-wrote the screenplay.

Worth watching with someone. Also worth watching alone at midnight with the lights off.

Eight friends have a dinner party the same night a comet passes close to Earth. The power goes out. Strange things happen. It goes from there.

Shot for $50,000 with almost no crew, largely improvised, and somehow one of the best sci-fi thrillers of the 2010s. The cast were given character backstories but not a script, which makes the building paranoia feel disturbingly real. By the time it ends you'll want to either immediately rewatch it or go outside and verify that your neighbors are your neighbors.

This is the one to put on when someone says they've seen everything worth watching.