As a cinemagoer, you never want to be waiting for your film to end. The cause of such a feeling might be boredom, or an increasingly desperate toilet situation, or regret at not packing enough snacks. Most annoyingly, you might actually be enjoying whatever you’re watching, just tinged with a niggling sensation that so-and-so self-indulgent auteur can’t help but slightly outstay their welcome, losing you in the final act. For all those situations, there’s an easy solution: an intermission. A mid-movie pause, so the audience can have a break, the story can reset, and everyone comes into Part 2 feeling energised. This, most wisely, is the choice taken by The Brutalist.

Brady Corbet’s heavily-Oscar-nommed, big-serious-drama epic clocks in at a – fittingly – brutal three hour and 35 minute runtime, true to its weighty ambitions. Brilliantly, 15 of those minutes constitute a mid-film intermission. This is not a cinema-dependent presentational flourish – it’s a literal part of the movie, hard-baked into the film itself, with a countdown clock and everything. And it’s used exactly as an intermission should be: not just an acknowledgement that 200 minutes is a bit of a bum-number, but that the story is better told, the audience more receptive, and the narrative arc of the film more cleanly delineated by that brief pause. It’s a film with a very clear ‘before’ and ‘after’. All hail the intermission.
As a certified Long Movie Enjoyer™, I think intermissions should be deployed far more liberally.
It’s an all-too-rare occurrence these days. After all, movie runtimes are – in general – getting longer, with your typical blockbuster more likely to clock in around 150 minutes than the sub-two-hour mark. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – in a world where there’s cause for concern around the global attention span, being able to immerse audiences and capture them for a reasonable period of time is an increasingly valuable commodity. But as a certified Long Movie Enjoyer™ (my ideal film runtime is either 90 minutes or 180), I think intermissions should be deployed far more liberally.

Decades ago, the intermission was a staple part of a movie epic. But their rarity in contemporary cinema only makes their occasional usage more notable. Prior to The Brutalist, it was used in Quentin Tarantino’s roadshow presentation of The Hateful Eight, a special release that was all about exaggerating the cinematic experience (screening in 70mm, with a four-minute opening overture too). He introduced it at the perfect time in the narrative – cranking up the tension through the first half, delivering some explosive violence at the end of ‘Chapter 3’, and then letting viewers regroup before the bodies really start piling up in the second half. Zack Snyder, too, spoke about a 10-minute intermission for theatrical screenings of his XXL Snyder Cut of Justice League (a colossal four-hour behemoth); on the big-screen, RRR features an intermission (in keeping with much of Indian cinema). These are films that benefit from a pause, with plenty of ideal places to provide one.
You could say the same, though, about myriad other movies in recent memory – ones that specifically opted against the use of an intermission. Martin Scorsese, I’m looking at you. End of Part One.
THIS ARTICLE WILL RESUME AFTER A BRIEF INTERMISSION
THIS ARTICLE CONTINUES IN 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…
I went out of my way to see The Irishman on the big screen. It was a film that demanded my undivided attention. And like The Brutalist, it clocks in at 200+ minutes – just, in this case, without an intermission. The result was absolutely captivating, a cinematic journey through an entire lifetime, its runtime entirely justified. It’s just, I could barely walk by the time the credits rolled. I literally staggered out of the King’s Cross Everyman.
Martin Scorsese has eschewed the use of intermissions – as is his absolute right, being one of the greatest filmmakers of all time – despite his recent films reaching gargantuan lengths; certain cinemas that put their own intermission into Killers Of The Flower Moon (runtime: 198 minutes) came under fire, having broken their licensing agreements to do so. Legendary editor Thelma Schoonmaker said including an intermission was “not right”. To my mind, both Irishman and Killers really could have done with one, at a point of the filmmakers’ choosing.

The argument against intermissions, it seems, is that they break the immersion of the cinema experience. One minute you’re caught up in the story; the next, the lights are up, people are milling around, checking their phones, and restocking on snacks. But I’d argue that it increases immersion when the film is actually playing. It can be more distracting to pace your liquid intake, or to squash that wandering thought about the thing you forgot to do before the film started, or to ignore those stomach rumbles when a film doesn’t offer a break. If you designate a time for audiences to do whatever they need to do, you then mark the film itself as a time to lock in. Knowing an intermission is coming is its own relief.
Best of all, an intermission can be used as a dramatic tool – it offers a punctuation point in the story, the chance to drop a cliffhanger, or to allow a dramatic moment to breathe. It can, I’d argue, heighten the audience experience. The positive reception to The Brutalist’s intermission isn’t just because it breaks up a lengthy movie – it’s a fun additional part of the cinema experience, and a moment for those caught up in the story to rave about it at the midway mark. Clearly, given how many people I’ve seen sharing images from their intermission on social media, it’s going down incredibly well with regular audiences.

I don’t want filmmakers to rein in their three-hour epics. And I don’t want intermissions dropped at random into films that don’t need them. But the relationship between movie epics and the audience’s needs should be considered. Come on, Hollywood – give us a break.
The Brutalist is out now in UK cinemas. With an interval.