The 100 Best Movies Under Two Hours to Watch This Holiday Season

In 1984, TIME film critic Richard Corliss wrote a piece titled “Why Do Movies Seem So Long?” In it, he recalled a piece of wisdom from Columbia Pictures co-founder Harry Cohn, whose method for judging the quality of a film came down to this: “If my fanny squirms, it's bad. If my fanny doesn't squirm, it's good."

The question Corliss explored that year is a perennial one, and it’s typically posed as a gripe.