From Solaris to Sátántangó, here is a selection of epic movies with mammoth running times to while away the hours

Another hacked-about epic, Sergio Leone’s 1984 last feature – a brutal, baffling chronicle of gangsters in New York’s Lower East Side – weighed in at almost four hours in its original cut. James Woods and Robert De Niro excel in this extended version, though there’s a nasty rape scene to be wary of.

Béla Tarr is the master of bleakly beautiful but painstakingly leisurely art cinema and this 1994 film is his ultimate challenge. It follows a prophet-like figure who returns to a rundown village, but it’s all about the spell that the crisply desolate images exert.

Silent films could get pretty long but this 1927 work – one cut runs at more than nine hours – is probably the medium’s towering achievement: a monumental biopic of the general by Abel Gance. It’s now a more modest five hours in film historian Kevin Brownlow’s restoration.

The New Hollywood boomlet at the turn of the millennium had plenty of high points, but Paul Thomas Anderson’s three-hour 1999 drama was arguably the highest: an intricately designed tapestry of intertwined characters and stories, with a brilliant cast ranging from Julianne Moore to Tom Cruise.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 cosmic meditation on memory and regret is not even his longest film, but as a way to just stretch out and let your mind float free it’s arguably his greatest – most evidently in the zero-grav “levitation” scene, which rises above the slightly primitive special effects to achieve an uplifting transcendence.