When it comes to camera work, few things are more in your face than the uninterrupted “long” take. It’s something that so openly flaunts its own complexity that even those unfamiliar with film and its techniques can admire the sheer duration of a shot. While at times overused in the modern era, long takes, when executed well, are cinema at its purest and well worth poring over.

As cameras got lighter, VFX became more photorealistic, and talented filmmakers got better and better, long takes improved right alongside them. While top ten lists for this category usually (and rightfully) make their way back to shots from classics like Touch of Evil, and modern classics like Goodfellas and Children of Men, it’s finally time to leave those movies to the lists of old and talk about the best long takes of this past decade.

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10. It Follows

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Opening your movie with a well-executed long take is a sure-fire way to win over your audience from the get-go. This is what David Robert Mitchell did with his 2014 horror film, It Follows. The movie opens with a young woman running out of her house wearing only pajamas, carefully circling around her quiet, suburban street, before running back into her house and escaping in a car from an unseen threat.

The shot lasts less than two minutes, but in that time it manages to efficiently set up the entire film. Firstly, it establishes the nature of the threat facing the protagonists of It Follows, cleverly informing the still clueless audience that this monster is invisible to those not “infected," moves at a walking pace, and never gives up. The shot also brazenly wears David Robert Mitchell’s influences on its sleeve, homaging the classic opening scene of John Carpenter's Halloween, and preparing you for a movie that’s simultaneously a beautiful throwback to classic horror and something entirely new.

9. True Detective

matthew mcconaughey true detective

Season 1, Episode 4 of True Detective is arguably its best episode. What isn’t arguable, however, is that it features the show’s most impressive shot. The scene that it’s in has Detective Rust Cohle working undercover with some painfully incompetent criminals, trapped in a terrible plan to rob a house in a gang-affiliated trailer park. When chaos inevitably erupts and guns begin going off, Rust calls an audible, blowing his cover by grabbing his target gang member and dragging him through the streets of the neighborhood until reaching his partner and successfully escaping.

Clocking in at almost six minutes, this shot is remarkably impressive from a technical, performance, and stunt work level, but that’s not why it’s on this list. What’s so incredible about this long take is that it happened on TV. Shows like The Sopranos and Game of Thrones may have started the "golden age of television,” but with this one-shot in True Detective, director Cary Joji Fukunaga proclaimed loudly and clearly that the medium of TV no longer had to pick between A-List actors, high production value, and brilliant camerawork, it could have all three at the same time.

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8. Creed

Ryan Coogler’s 2015 boxing film, Creed is a continuation of the Rocky franchise, this time featuring Apollo Creed’s son, Adonis Johnson, as the main character. Both Coogler and lead actor Michael B. Jordan do a phenomenal job revitalizing the series with a movie that features an engaging story, believable characters, and some truly memorable fights.

Perhaps the best of these boxing matches is Johnson’s first fight of the film in a professional ring, where an uninterrupted four-minute steady-cam shot takes us through every punch, dodge and knockout. It’s an intense sequence that puts you in the ring with Jordan, showing off the incredible abilities of the two boxers with tight camerawork and excellent choreography.

7. 12 Years a Slave

While long takes usually evoke the idea of a rapidly moving steady-cam and intricate staging, there’s also an entirely different type of long take, one that’s restrained. Director Steve McQueen proved that the latter shot can be just as, if not more, emotionally powerful with his 2013 masterpiece, 12 Years a Slave. The shot in question is from a technical perspective, incredibly simple: wide lens, static camera. The subject matter is far less so, however. It shows the protagonist of the film, Solomon Northup, a formerly free man who was betrayed and sold into slavery, hanging by his neck from a tree, desperately clawing at the ground below him with his toes, a mere inch away from suffocating to death.

As the people on the rest of the farm in the background of the shot go about their day normally, the audience is forced to watch for nearly two minutes as Solomon chokes. To say that this horrific moment is hard to look at would be an understatement. But ultimately, that’s the point. Not to manipulate your emotions or to create shock value, but to force you to witness the brutality and injustice of a time not so long ago. It puts you in the shoes of Solomon’s peers, unable to help the kind, intelligent man being tortured, and unable to look away.

6. Daredevil

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The Netflix show, Daredevil, is no stranger to long takes. The first season blew people away with its Oldboy-inspired hallway fight scene, and Season 2 upped the stakes with a longer, although unfortunately digitally patched together, action sequence in a stairwell. Those were nothing, however, compared to the unbelievable prison escape in Season 3, Episode 4, “Blindsided.”

True Detective was making a statement about how good a TV long take could be, with this shot, Daredevil said, "Look how good an action sequence can be," period. Standing at over eleven minutes long, this shot does it all, taking you through a massive prison set with dozens of stunt performers, hundreds of extras, and lead actor Charlie Cox and his stunt double, Chris Brewster, switching back and forth throughout the sequence. Not to mention that there’s an entire dialogue scene halfway through the action! Hats off to the entire cast and crew of Daredevil for pulling this insane one off.

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5. Before Midnight

Slowing down a little and moving away from the action, it’s important to recognize that sometimes the strength of a long take doesn’t come from the physical feats within it but rather from the beauty in watching the uninterrupted acting of talented performers reading exceptional dialogue. This is the case in the 13-minute car ride conversation between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Richard Linklater’s third installment in the Before trilogy: Before Midnight.

The scene follows the now married Jesse and Celine as they drive back from the airport after dropping off Jesse’s son at the airport. It’s the last day of their vacation in Greece and their naturalistic conversation covers a range of topics, from Celine’s career to the difficulty of being a long-distance father. It’s a subtle shot that doesn’t call attention to itself, emphasizing the conversation while, in a way, homaging the previous entries in the series, which also featured long, uninterrupted shots of the couple walking together and learning about each other's lives. While similar on a surface level, the nature of this reused two-shot more so contrasts those previous, flirtatious conversations of their youth. Rather than philosophizing and reminiscing like teenagers, they discuss important upcoming life decisions and the problems that are arising in their marriage. While still a funny and charming scene, it primarily exists to set the stage for the main conflict while grounding the romantic trilogy in a previously unseen manner.

4. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri

Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri is a film that, like many of his projects, teeters the line between being a hilarious, vulgar comedy, and a crushing drama. This balance tips over to the side of drama following the death of Police Chief Willoughby and his off-kilter officer Dixon’s very violent reaction. Erroneously blaming Willoughby’s death on the man who rented out the three billboards at the center of the film’s drama, Dixon decides to take his misplaced anger out on him.

The shot in question follows Dixon, played phenomenally by Sam Rockwell, from the police station to the billboard owner, Red Shelby’s, shop, smashing a glass door and window on the way and tossing Shelby from the second floor, onto the street below. We then go back with Dixon down the stairs as he once again assaults the crawling Shelby before making his way into the police station. It’s a shot that reflects the emotional state of the character within it, keeping the audience right by his side to witness him hitting rock bottom. The scene is granted even more impact by the rest of the movie, in which we watch Dixon redeem himself, or at least attempt to, as best he can.

3. Roma

Alfonso Cuaron’s 2018 masterpiece Roma hardly needs any introduction. Having won three Academy Awards, including best director, praising it is the equivalent of shouting into a very friendly echo chamber. Regardless, to make this list without mentioning at least one of the beautiful, black and white, long takes of the movie would be dishonest.

While everyone has their favorite moment from Roma, the one that’s making the list is the 5-minute tracking shot at the end of the film where the main character, Cleo, saves two of the children she helped raise from drowning despite not knowing how to swim. On a long dolly that follows her into the water and out, the final frame shows the whole family surrounding Cleo in a loving embrace as the sun sets behind them. It’s a breathtaking moment full of emotion that’s elevated by beautiful, uninterrupted camerawork, creating a unique climax to a film that already rests in the annals of film history.

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2. Climax

Far less touching but no less impressive is Gaspar Noe’s 2018 horror-dance movie, Climax. To say Gaspar Noe’s films aren’t for everyone would be the understatement of the decade, but if you think you have the stomach for them then this is one to watch for sure. The movie takes place in real-time over the course of a party thrown by a french dance troupe following a rehearsal. When someone spikes the sangria with psychedelics, things take a turn for the worse as the group begins to hallucinate and turn on each other.

The film itself is composed of only a few, stupefyingly long shots, with one standing at 42 minutes and the opening dance number at (a mere) 13. The combination of the disturbingly physical performances, both in dance sequences and dialogue scenes, and the movement of the camera, which frequently flips upside down or sporadically changes direction, is simultaneously unnerving and mesmerizing. The movie is intentionally hard to watch, at all times jarring, terrifying, uncomfortable, and from a technical level, breathtaking.

1. 1917

There’s a long history of one-take films. Alfred Hitchcock gave it a shot in 1948 with Rope, implementing techniques to hide cuts that would be used in future “fake” single-shot films like Cuaron’s Birdman (2014). Some filmmakers have actually pulled off completely uninterrupted films, like Aleksandr Sokurov with his film Russian Ark (2002) and, more recently, director Sebastian Schipper’s 2015 feature Victoria. While all these movies are remarkable achievements in their own right, the number one spot on this list undoubtedly has to go to director Sam Mendes’ and cinematographer Roger Deakins’ unbelievable 2019 war epic, 1917.

1917 begs one to wonder how it was physically possible to pull a movie like this off. While there’s no way to know exactly how many hidden cuts are spread throughout the film, most shots are apparently a minimum of about ten minutes. These are ten minutes sequences that often involve stunts, massive rigs with complex lighting cues, and hundreds and hundreds of fully dressed background actors. The camera is passed off from person to person, from cranes to lines and back again into the hands of quite possibly the most talented (and exhausted) camera operators working today. Beyond the technical insanity, it’s a movie that features beautiful, honest performances that are enhanced by a camera that refuses to cut away. It’s a film that serves as the standard for how to implement a stylistic choice for a narrative reason. You’ll be on the edge of your seat for the whole movie not because you’re wondering where the next hidden cut will be, but because you’ll be spending two hours living and breathing in the same, terrifying world as the heroic British soldiers from the Great War.

Ultimately, a long take is just one of the many tools at a filmmaker’s disposal. Nothing says that not cutting is better than cutting, yet over and over again lists, articles, and videos are made gushing over the best and longest shots of all time. A large reason behind the widespread appeal of this technique stems from its inherent subjectivity. After all, we as people play out our lives in long uninterrupted takes, and to enter a world or a character’s perspective in this manner can be exhilarating. Long takes hold us hostage as audience members, and if done well, can engage us in profound and remarkable ways. One thing is for sure, this decade had no shortage of breathtaking oners and. hopefully, the next ten years will somehow raise the bar once again.

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