Newsweek critic David Ansen wondered if studios weren’t reluctant to give notes to some of the biggest and most visionary directors in Hollywood. Speaking to the Daily Beast three decades later, Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers blamed the bloat on studios’ misguided belief that the longer the movie, the greater the sheen of prestige, the greater the potential for prestigious awards.

In Corliss’ estimation, movies had become “longer but not richer,” a trend he argued began toward the end of World War II when movies shifted, broadly speaking, from creations of the studio system to the artistic visions of directors. The question Corliss explored that year is a perennial one, and it’s typically posed as a gripe.

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.

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