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Margaret “extended cut” (2011)
“No good movie is too long,” Roger Ebert wrote long ago, “and no bad movie is short enough.” It’s definitely possible for a good movie to be too short, however. Case in point: the theatrically released cut of
Kenneth Lonergan’s long-awaited and long-delayed sophomore feature. Contractually obligated to deliver a movie running no more than two and a half hours, Lonergan spent some five years in the editing room (on and off) struggling to hit that arbitrary mark without debilitating his baby; the version that finally arrived in theaters runs precisely two hours, 29 minutes, and 53 seconds. It’s a masterful job, in hindsight, managing to preserve the contours of the wildly ambitious project that Lonergan had in mind. But