best long takes

The 10 Best Long Takes In Film

Comingsoon.net is taking a looong look at some of the best long takes in film history. Check out our selections in the gallery below!

Back before the invention (and the innovation) of montage, thanks largely to filmmakers like D.W. Griffith, Lev Kuleshov, and Sergei Eisenstein, movies had to restrict themselves to a single shot where everything that was scripted had to take place within the confines of that one take. Of course, this isn’t the case anymore—remember that viral Tweet that showed Liam Neeson hopping over a fence in Taken 3 with seventeen cuts over the course of a few seconds?—but many filmmakers still choose to utilize one-takes (more specifically long takes).

Paul Thomas Anderson is a big champion of the long take, but there are countless directors who came before him and even more that came after who used this shooting style in their works. Some have done it better, while plenty have done it worse, but Anderson and his colleagues love to show off just how cool these takes turn out if done correctly. Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock might be pioneers, but plenty have continued to carry on that legacy into the 21st century.

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