The long take: 21 films built on unbroken shots

Weekly collection in the app for the week of May 29, 2026.

A cut is a blink, and some directors refuse to blink. The long take is cinema's highest-wire act: Hitchcock hiding reel changes in Rope, Sokurov gliding through the Hermitage in one real ninety-six-minute shot, Cuarón's camera inside a refugee bus while the world ends outside it.

This collection of 21 films ran as the weekly theme in the I Like Movies Discover tab for the week of May 29, 2026, featuring Children of Men. Some entries are single takes, real (Russian Ark, Victoria) or stitched (1917, Birdman); the rest deploy the unbroken shot as a signature scene, from the Copacabana entrance in Goodfellas to the corridor fight in Oldboy.

The collection

1. Children of Men (2006) Cuarón Featured In 2027, no child has been born for eighteen years; a burnt-out bureaucrat must smuggle a miraculously pregnant refugee to the coast. Its single-take car ambush and street battle rewrote action cinema. Cast: Clive Owen, Clare-Hope Ashitey, Chiwetel Ejiofor
2. Rope (1948) Hitchcock Two students murder a classmate to prove their superiority, hide the body in a chest, and host a dinner party on top of it; Hitchcock staged it as one continuous take with hidden cuts. Cast: James Stewart, John Dall, Farley Granger
3. Russian Ark (2002) Sokurov An invisible narrator drifts through the Hermitage and three hundred years of Russian history, ending in a vast czarist ball; one real 96-minute Steadicam take, two thousand costumed extras, no cuts. Cast: Sergey Dreyden, Mariya Kuznetsova, Leonid Mozgovoy
4. 1917 (2019) Mendes Two British soldiers cross No Man's Land with an order that will stop 1,600 men walking into a trap; staged and stitched to play as a single unbroken shot. Cast: George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Mark Strong
5. Birdman (2014) Iñárritu A washed-up superhero actor stakes everything on a Broadway play while his ego literally talks back; edited to appear as one continuous backstage take. It won Best Picture. Cast: Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Zach Galifianakis
6. Touch of Evil (1958) Welles A Mexican narcotics agent honeymooning on the border collides with a corrupt American cop over a car bombing; opens with the crane shot every film school studies. Cast: Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Orson Welles
7. Goodfellas (1990) Scorsese Thirty years inside the New York mob, narrated by the man who loved every minute until it ate him; the Copacabana entrance, one take through the kitchen, is the whole seduction in miniature. Cast: Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci
8. The Player (1992) Altman A studio executive being blackmailed by a rejected writer kills the wrong man and keeps rising; opens with an eight-minute take that name-checks famous long takes while performing one. Cast: Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward
9. Boogie Nights (1997) P.T. Anderson A San Fernando Valley dishwasher becomes a porn star in the industry's 1970s golden age, then the eighties arrive; enters its world through one glorious poolside tracking shot. Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore
10. Magnolia (1999) P.T. Anderson Nine lives across one San Fernando Valley day, dying fathers, quiz kids, a misogynist guru, spiral toward coincidence and a biblical downpour; three hours at full emotional volume. Cast: Tom Cruise, Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman
11. Atonement (2007) Joe Wright A child's lie about what she saw destroys two lovers on the eve of war; its five-minute Steadicam crawl along the Dunkirk beach is among the most famous single shots ever attempted. Cast: James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan
12. Police, Adjective (2009) Porumboiu A young Romanian cop tails a teenager sharing hash and stalls on conscience, until his chief opens a dictionary and defines his duty at him; deadpan, patient, quietly furious. Cast: Dragoș Bucur, Vlad Ivanov, Ion Stoica
13. The Sacrifice (1986) Tarkovsky As nuclear war breaks over the radio, a retired intellectual offers God everything he has, including his home and his silence, to undo it; Tarkovsky's final film, with a six-minute burning-house take. Cast: Erland Josephson, Susan Fleetwood, Allan Edwall
14. Oldboy (2003) Park Chan-wook Imprisoned in a private cell for fifteen years without explanation, then released, a man gets five days to find out why; the one-take corridor hammer fight is its signature, the ending its scar. Cast: Choi Min-sik, Yoo Ji-tae, Kang Hye-jung
15. Elephant (2003) Van Sant An ordinary high-school day tracked in long gliding hallway shots, the same minutes crossing from student to student, drifting toward a shooting; Van Sant's Palme d'Or winner after Columbine. Cast: Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson
16. Hard Boiled (1992) Woo A tea-house shootout introduces a cop who loses his partner and goes into a gun-runners' hospital fortress; contains a legendary minutes-long single-take battle across two floors. Cast: Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Anthony Wong
17. Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) Tarr A circus truck hauls a whale carcass into a frozen Hungarian town and unrest follows; thirty-nine long takes of eerie, gathering menace, with an asylum raid that empties the soul. Cast: Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz, Hanna Schygulla
18. The Passenger (1975) Antonioni A worn-out reporter in the Sahara swaps identities with a dead arms dealer and inherits the man's appointments; ends on a seven-minute shot through a window grate that critics still argue about. Cast: Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider, Jenny Runacre
19. Weekend (1967) Godard A scheming bourgeois couple drive into a countryside collapsing into apocalypse and cannibal revolutionaries; built around an eight-minute tracking shot along one endless traffic jam. Cast: Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Jean-Pierre Kalfon
20. Le Trou (1960) Becker Four Paris cellmates cut, dig and crawl toward escape with a new arrival they are not sure they can trust; the digging happens in unbroken real-time takes that make you hold your breath. Cast: Michel Constantin, Jean Keraudy, Philippe Leroy
21. Victoria (2015) Schipper A Spanish woman in Berlin falls in with four charming strangers whose favor for a gangster becomes a bank robbery; one real 138-minute take across twenty-two locations, no hidden cuts. Cast: Laia Costa, Frederick Lau, Franz Rogowski

Keep your place

Keep the collection on your I Like Movies watchlist and cross films off as you watch; the app tracks what is left. Every Friday a new themed collection arrives in the Discover tab.

Questions people ask

Which films are really one single take?

Russian Ark (2002) and Victoria (2015) genuinely are: one camera, one take, no hidden cuts. Rope, Birdman and 1917 simulate the effect with concealed edits.

Why do directors use long takes?

Unbroken time builds tension no montage can fake, because the audience knows nothing was fixed later. It is also among the hardest things to pull off on a set, which is part of the appeal.

The week before: African cinema: 21 essential films. The week after: Queer classics: 21 essential LGBTQ films. See every weekly theme, or browse every guide, watch order and comparison.