High quality, small size: films of 95 minutes or less
All the best short features, each with a story line, a spec sheet and a Watch now button.
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Story line: A young Peruvian bear travels to London in search of a home. Finding himself lost and alone at Paddington Station, he meets the kindly Brown family, who offer him a temporary haven.
Story line: Nine years later, Jesse travels across Europe giving readings from a book he wrote about the night he spent in Vienna with Celine. After his reading in Paris, Celine finds him, and they spend part of the day together before Jesse has to again leave for a …
Story line: A gold prospector in Alaska struggles to survive the elements and win the heart of a dance hall girl.
Story line: When Juli meets Bryce in the second grade, she knows it's true love. After spending six years trying to convince Bryce the same, she's ready to give up - until he starts to reconsider.
Story line: Forced by his son's birthday wish, fast-talking attorney and habitual liar Fletcher Reede must tell the truth for the next 24 hours.
Story line: Professor Wilson discovers a lost Akita puppy on his way home. Despite objections from his wife, Hachi endears himself to the family and grows to be Parker's loyal companion. As their bond grows deeper, a beautiful relationship unfolds.
Story line: On a quest to find out what happened to his missing brother, a scientist, his nephew and their mountain guide discover a fantastic and dangerous lost world in the center of the earth.
Story line: Sean Anderson partners with his mom's boyfriend on a mission to find his grandfather, who is thought to be missing on a mythical island.
Story line: After the highs of winning the world championships, the Bellas find themselves split apart and discovering there aren't job prospects for making music with your mouth. But when they get the chance to reunite for an overseas USO tour, this group of awesome …
Story line: Routinely exploited by her wicked stepmother, the downtrodden Samantha Montgomery is excited about the prospect of meeting her Internet beau at the school's Halloween dance.
300mbFilms keeps one rule, and the rule is in its motto: high quality, small size. Every film it lists runs for ninety-five minutes or less. There are 185 of them, made between 1925 and 2025, and their average length is exactly an hour and a half. Each has a post with a story line and a spec sheet, and a page with its cast, its rating and a single Watch now button.
The rule is kinder than it sounds. Many of the best-loved films ever made are short. Chaplin needed seventy-two minutes for The Circus. Richard Linklater told one of the great love stories of this century in the eighty minutes of Before Sunset. Paddington stops at ninety-five, Liar Liar at eighty-six, and Flipped at eighty-nine. A short film has made its choices; it arrives, does what it came to do and leaves the evening free. Every title here was also screened by hand for a family audience, so the lists are full of comedy, romance, family adventure and warm drama.
This guide explains the page and the spec sheet, goes through the three bands of running time and the lists by subject, and ends with practical answers. The short version is on How to watch with 300mbFilms.
The site is laid out as a plain white blog. The name stands at the top in a serif face, with the motto in small italics opposite. Under it runs a row of dark tabs: Home, three bands of running time, Comedy, Family, List of Movies and My Queue. A thick dark rule closes the header.
The home page is a column of ten posts beside a bordered sidebar. Each post has a blue title giving the film's name, year and length. A grey line says which genres it is filed under. A poster stands at the left, and to its right come the story line, a grey box of six dotted lines called the spec sheet, and a Read more button. The sidebar holds four panels: By running time, Categories, Most watched and By period.
A film page gives the poster, the year, the running time, the score out of ten, the full summary, the cast and the director. A selector beside the Watch now button offers fifteen countries; choose one, press the button, and JustWatch shows the subscription, rental, purchase and free services that carry the film there. Finding a film describes the search box and the lists.
The grey box under each story line is the signature of the site. It sets out six facts in a typewriter face, each label in square brackets and joined to its value by a row of dots: GENRE, RUNTIME, YEAR, DIRECTOR, CAST and RATING. The post for Paddington reads Comedy, Adventure and Family; 95 min; 2014; Paul King; the two leading names of its cast; and its score.
The sheet exists so that a film can be judged in five seconds. A visitor who wants something under an hour and a half for tonight, made in the 1980s, with a familiar name in the cast, can run an eye down the posts and stop at the right one. The runtime line matters most on a site with this rule, and it appears again as a small tag on every poster in every list. The spec sheet page explains each line.
The home page shows ten films at a time, beginning with six chosen by the editors. Paddington is the first: a bear from Peru, a London family, a villain from the Natural History Museum and a great deal of marmalade, all inside ninety-five minutes. Before Sunset follows, then The Gold Rush, the oldest film in the guide, in which Chaplin's tramp goes prospecting in the snow.
Flipped tells the story of a girl and the boy across the road, each remembering the same events differently. Liar Liar gives Jim Carrey a lawyer who is obliged by his son's birthday wish to tell the truth for a day, and Hachi: A Dog's Tale is the story of a dog who waits at a railway station each evening, which scores 8.0. The four posts after them are the next most watched: Journey to the Center of the Earth, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, Pitch Perfect 3 and A Cinderella Story. A link at the foot of the column opens all 185.
The first band holds the twenty-six shortest films, from seventy-two to eighty-five minutes. The very shortest are comedies from the early years of cinema: The Circus at seventy-two minutes, the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business at seventy-seven, in which the four stow away on an ocean liner in barrels, and Buster Keaton's Go West at eighty-three.
Modern films of this length tend to be either very light or very pure. Starstruck, Invisible Sister and Stuck in the Suburbs are Disney Channel comedies of about eighty minutes. Before Sunset and Wendy and Lucy are both eighty minutes long and both contain hardly a wasted second; the second follows a young woman and her dog stranded in a small Oregon town when her car gives out. An Adventure in Space and Time tells in eighty-three minutes how a small team at the BBC created a famous science-fiction series in 1963.
The band also holds Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, Old Yeller, The Man in the White Suit, Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, StreetDance 2, Ballet Shoes, People, Places, Things, a gentle comedy about a cartoonist raising twin daughters, and three Christmas films of eighty-three to eighty-five minutes. Any of them can be started after dinner and finished before the kettle has been filled twice.
Fifty-six films fall between eighty-six and ninety minutes, the length that comedy writers have always considered ideal. Liar Liar is eighty-six. Bean, Jingle All the Way, Bride Wars and Flipped are eighty-nine. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Mr. Bean's Holiday, Serendipity, Little Manhattan, Like Crazy and Marty are ninety exactly.
Marty deserves a second look. It won the Academy Award for best picture in 1956 and remains the shortest film ever to do so: ninety minutes about a butcher in the Bronx who has almost given up on meeting anyone, and the schoolteacher he meets at a dance hall on a Saturday night. Its brevity is part of its truthfulness.
The band is rich in films made for television, where a ninety-minute slot is the rule: The Ron Clark Story, with Matthew Perry as a teacher who takes on the most difficult class in a Harlem school, Radio Rebel, Cloud 9, How to Build a Better Boy, Rags and several Christmas romances. It also holds The Palm Beach Story, The Borrowers, Tuck Everlasting, The Perfect Date and Harold and the Purple Crayon.
The largest band, with 103 films, runs from ninety-one to ninety-five minutes. This is the length at which a story can afford a subplot and a proper ending, and most of the guide's best-known titles are here: Paddington, Hachi: A Dog's Tale, The Gold Rush, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, A Cinderella Story, Camp Rock, Pitch Perfect 3, The Kings of Summer and Enough Said.
The classics in the band include My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth, Make Way for Tomorrow, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and I Know Where I'm Going!. From the 1980s and 1990s come Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Mr. Mom, The Great Outdoors, Some Kind of Wonderful, L.A. Story and Strictly Ballroom. From this century come Best in Show, Miss Potter, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Love & Friendship, Theater Camp and The Legend of Ochi, the newest film in the guide. The running times page links to all three bands.
There is a craft to brevity, and the films in this guide show it. A director with ninety minutes must begin the story in the first scene. Liar Liar has explained its premise before the opening titles are over. Before Sunset starts with its two characters already face to face. The Awful Truth has a marriage in ruins by the end of its first reel and spends the rest putting it back together.
Short films also trust the audience. They leave out the scene that explains what everyone has already understood, and they end when the story ends. The studio comedies of the 1930s were made this way as a matter of routine, which is one reason they still feel quick. The habit returned with the television film and the streaming film, both of which are written to a clock.
For the viewer the advantages are practical. A film of ninety minutes fits between dinner and bedtime, between two tasks, or into the attention of a seven-year-old. It can be watched twice. And when it disappoints, as any film may, it has taken little of the evening with it.
Comedy is the largest category, with 123 films, which is to be expected: comedy has always been the art of leaving before the laughter stops. The screwball classics lead it. In My Man Godfrey a society family hires a man from the city dump as their butler and is gradually reformed by him. The Awful Truth sets Cary Grant and Irene Dunne to spoiling each other's new romances, and The Palm Beach Story sends a wife to Florida and a trainload of millionaires after her.
The 1980s made a speciality of the family holiday gone wrong. The Great Outdoors and Summer Rental both star John Candy as a father whose rest is interrupted, once by relatives and a bear, once by a rival yachtsman. Mr. Mom gives Michael Keaton the housework while his wife goes out to work. Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Tim Burton's first feature, is a cross-country search for a stolen bicycle, and The Lonely Guy has Steve Martin as a man learning to dine alone in New York.
More recent comedy includes Best in Show, a mock documentary about a dog show, Theater Camp, made in the same manner about a summer school for stage-struck children, Man Up, Enough Said, Poms, in which Diane Keaton founds a cheerleading squad in a retirement community, and Genie, with Melissa McCarthy granting wishes in New York at Christmas. The comedy guide sorts the category by era.
Drama and romance have eighty-one films each, and many films carry both labels. Three adaptations of Jane Austen are here, all brief: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, made for British television in 2007 at ninety-three minutes apiece, and Love & Friendship, a comedy from one of her early stories. Easy Virtue and Miss Potter, with Renée Zellweger as the creator of Peter Rabbit, are period pieces of the same compact kind.
Modern romance is represented by Before Sunset, Serendipity, Like Crazy, Love at First Sight, The Giant Mechanical Man, about a street performer and a zoo attendant, and Le Week-End, in which a long-married English couple return to Paris for their anniversary and say everything they have been saving up. 5 Flights Up follows another long marriage through one weekend of trying to sell a Brooklyn flat.
The dramas are quiet and humane. Wendy and Lucy and Penguin Bloom are about people helped through a hard time by an animal. Mozart and the Whale is a love story between two people on the autism spectrum. Front of the Class, which scores 8.0, tells the true story of a man with Tourette syndrome who was turned down by twenty-four schools before one let him teach. The drama and romance guide covers both categories.
Eighty films are filed under family, nearly half the guide, because films for children have always been made short. Paddington, The Borrowers, Madeline and Harold and the Purple Crayon come from picture books and novels for the young. Tuck Everlasting and The Last Mimzy are gentle fantasies. Diary of a Wimpy Kid, its sequel Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days, Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life and Sleepover are comedies of the school years.
Walt Disney's live-action films of the 1950s and 1960s were models of economy: Old Yeller at eighty-four minutes, Darby O'Gill and the Little People, The Ugly Dachshund and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes at just over ninety. The Disney Channel carried on the tradition with The Thirteenth Year, The Cheetah Girls, Starstruck, Teen Beach Movie, Zapped and Adventures in Babysitting.
The films of the Olsen twins, Billboard Dad, Passport to Paris and Winning London, belong to a particular moment at the turn of the century and still please the audience they were made for. The family guide sorts the category by age.
Twenty-one films give an animal the leading part. Dogs dominate. Hachi: A Dog's Tale, My Dog Skip, Old Yeller and Benji the Hunted are stories of loyalty. Rescued by Ruby is the true story of a shelter dog who became a police search dog, and Dog Gone of a father and son who walk a mountain trail in search of a lost pet. Best in Show, Think Like a Dog, Chestnut: Hero of Central Park, The Ugly Dachshund and Beverly Hills Chihuahua 3: Viva la Fiesta! take the lighter view.
The two Homeward Bound films send two dogs and a cat across country to find their family. Horses have Black Beauty and Flicka. The One and Only Ivan is about a gorilla who lives in a shopping mall, Penguin Bloom about a magpie, Holiday in the Wild about elephants, and Paddington about a bear who would be offended to find himself on this list. The animals guide arranges them by species.
Twenty-one films are set aside for December, and the season suits the site's rule, since a Christmas film is nearly always brisk. The family comedies come first. Jingle All the Way is a father's last-minute hunt for the toy of the year. Unaccompanied Minors strands a group of children in a snowbound airport on Christmas Eve and lets them run it. I'll Be Home for Christmas sends a student across America in a Santa suit, and Beethoven's Christmas Adventure gives the big dog a sleigh to rescue.
The royal romances are a small genre of their own. A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding, A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby, A Royal Christmas and Crown for Christmas all take an ordinary young woman to a snowy palace in a kingdom that appears on few maps. The Knight Before Christmas reverses the journey and brings a knight to Ohio. Falling for Christmas, A Cinderella Christmas, Christmas Made to Order, Christmas Wonderland, Mingle All the Way, 12 Gifts of Christmas and Catering Christmas complete a shelf that could fill the whole of Advent.
Just Friends, Genie and the British Your Christmas or Mine?, in which two students each board the other's train home, are comedies for grown-ups, and Holiday in the Wild spends Christmas among elephants. The Christmas guide sorts the list.
Twenty films are listed under music. The singing films include Pitch Perfect 3, Camp Rock, The Cheetah Girls and its sequel The Cheetah Girls: One World, Rags, a musical that gives the Cinderella story to a boy who sings, and Teen Spirit, in which a shy girl from a small island enters a television singing contest.
Dance is as well served. Strictly Ballroom, the first film by Baz Luhrmann, is a glittering Australian comedy about a ballroom champion who dares to invent his own steps. Work It follows a student who must learn to dance in a hurry to impress a university. StreetDance 2, Center Stage: Turn It Up and Girls Just Want to Have Fun, with a young Sarah Jessica Parker competing for a place on a dance programme, cover three decades.
Two curiosities deserve a visit. True Stories, directed by David Byrne of Talking Heads, is a tour of an imaginary Texas town on the eve of its talent show. Rock 'n' Roll High School, from 1979, lets a school full of fans welcome their favourite band. The music guide lists all twenty.
Forty-five films carry the adventure label, which here includes fantasy and science fiction. The two Journey films, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, are both under ninety-five minutes and both treat the novels of Jules Verne as treasure maps. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure crosses several centuries in ninety minutes. Return to Nim's Island and Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain are adventures for younger viewers.
Fantasy is represented by Tuck Everlasting, about a family who have drunk from a spring of eternal life, The Last Mimzy, The King's Daughter, The Borrowers and The Legend of Ochi, in which a girl on a remote island befriends a creature her village fears. Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel and The Man in the White Suit are science fiction in the British comic manner. The adventure guide has more.
The top rated list holds the twenty-seven films that score 7.2 or higher. Four share first place at 8.0: The Gold Rush, Flipped, Hachi: A Dog's Tale and Front of the Class. The Circus follows at 7.9, Before Sunset at 7.8 and An Adventure in Space and Time at 7.7.
At 7.6 stand My Man Godfrey and The Ron Clark Story, and at 7.5 Marty, Make Way for Tomorrow, Work It and Rescued by Ruby. The rest of the list includes Blue Miracle, Rags, Another Cinderella Story, The One and Only Ivan, Chestnut: Hero of Central Park and Persuasion.
The list makes the site's argument for it. Two silent comedies, a 1930s screwball, a best picture winner, a talk in Paris and three modest television films all stand together at the top, and each of them is over inside ninety-five minutes. The top rated page gives the order.
Nineteen films date from before 1980, and they are a reminder that the short feature was once the normal one. In the 1920s and 1930s a programme at the cinema included a newsreel, a cartoon and often two features, so each feature had to be brief. The Gold Rush, Go West and The Circus come from the silent years. Monkey Business, My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth and Make Way for Tomorrow are all from the 1930s.
The 1940s contribute The Palm Beach Story, I Know Where I'm Going!, a romance set in the Scottish islands, and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. From the 1950s come The Man in the White Suit, Marty, Old Yeller, The Three Faces of Eve, The Old Man and the Sea and Darby O'Gill and the Little People, and from the 1960s and 1970s two Disney comedies and Rock 'n' Roll High School. The Before 1980 guide sets them in order.
Thirty-four films represent the 1980s and 1990s. The eighties were a good decade for the compact comedy. Gregory's Girl, made in Scotland in 1980, is about a gangling schoolboy who falls for the girl who has taken his place in the football team, and it is one of the sweetest films about being sixteen. Mr. Mom, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Summer Rental, One Crazy Summer, Some Kind of Wonderful, The Great Outdoors and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure followed.
The nineties films are mostly for families: Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey and its sequel, The Beverly Hillbillies, Black Beauty, The Brady Bunch Movie, Jingle All the Way, Bean, Good Burger, The Borrowers, Madeline and the 1997 television Cinderella, with Brandy in the title part and Whitney Houston as her fairy godmother. L.A. Story and Strictly Ballroom are two of the decade's most original romantic comedies, and Liar Liar is its most watched film in the guide.
Forty-one films come from the first decade of this century. It opened with Best in Show and My Dog Skip, the memoir of a boy and his terrier in a Mississippi town in the 1940s. Serendipity, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Tuck Everlasting followed, and Before Sunset arrived in 2004.
It was a busy decade for films aimed at girls and young teenagers: A Cinderella Story, Another Cinderella Story, The Lizzie McGuire Movie, Sleepover, The Cheetah Girls, Stuck in the Suburbs, Camp Rock and Ballet Shoes, a BBC film with Emma Watson as one of three adopted sisters at a stage school. The decade's other pleasures include Little Manhattan, Miss Potter, Flicka, Mr. Bean's Holiday, Wendy and Lucy, Easy Virtue, Hachi: A Dog's Tale and My Life in Ruins, in which a tour guide in Greece learns to enjoy her own tour.
The largest period list, with sixty-three films, covers the 2010s. Its best-known titles are Flipped, Paddington, The Kings of Summer, Enough Said, Love & Friendship and Pitch Perfect 3. The Disney Channel supplied Starstruck, Radio Rebel, Teen Beach Movie, Cloud 9, Zapped, How to Build a Better Boy, Invisible Sister and Adventures in Babysitting.
Smaller films give the list its character. The Giant Mechanical Man and People, Places, Things are romances about artists. Le Week-End and 5 Flights Up are about couples in later life. Final Portrait watches the sculptor Alberto Giacometti fail, day after day, to finish a painting of a patient friend. Troop Zero, set in rural Georgia in 1977, follows a group of misfit girl scouts who hope to have their voices sent into space. Full Out and Raising the Bar are about gymnasts, and Candy Jar about two school debaters.
Twenty-eight films date from 2020 onward, most of them made for streaming services, which have revived the ninety-minute feature. Work It, The One and Only Ivan, All Together Now and Made in Italy, in which a father and son restore a neglected house in Tuscany, all appeared in 2020. Blue Miracle, Penguin Bloom and Mixtape, about a girl in 1999 who tracks down the songs on a cassette her parents made, followed in 2021.
The years since have added Rescued by Ruby, Home Team, Love at First Sight, Theater Camp, Genie, Dog Gone, Irish Wish, Find Me Falling, Harold and the Purple Crayon and The Legend of Ochi. The periods page links to all five lists.
A good part of the catalogue was first shown on television, and the guide makes a point of including it. The television film has always worked to a fixed length, usually between eighty-five and ninety-five minutes, and it has produced some of the highest scores on the site. Front of the Class and The Ron Clark Story are both true stories about teachers. An Adventure in Space and Time and Magic Beyond Words: The J.K. Rowling Story are about how well-known works came to be made.
British television supplies the Austen adaptations and Ballet Shoes. The Disney Channel supplies two dozen comedies and musicals across four decades, from The Thirteenth Year in 1999 to Adventures in Babysitting in 2016, and the Christmas shelf is filled largely by films made for the home screen.
These films are easy to overlook because they were seldom reviewed. Their audiences were large all the same, and the best of them have the directness of a story told with little time to spare.
Short films are well suited to true stories, since a real life usually has one chapter worth telling. Front of the Class is about Brad Cohen, who decided as a boy that he would become the teacher he had lacked. The Ron Clark Story follows a teacher from a small town to New York. Full Out tells of a gymnast who returns to competition after a serious accident, with a dance troupe's help.
Blue Miracle is the story of a children's home in Mexico that entered a fishing tournament to pay its debts. Rescued by Ruby, Penguin Bloom and Dog Gone are all drawn from the news. Miss Potter and Final Portrait are portraits of artists, and Home Team is about a professional football coach who spends a year of suspension coaching his twelve-year-old son's team.
One of the pleasures of a short film is that there is time for a second. The guide's films pair naturally. The Gold Rush and The Circus together last under three hours and make a complete introduction to Chaplin. My Man Godfrey and The Awful Truth are the two best screwball comedies of 1936 and 1937, and The Palm Beach Story makes a third for those still awake.
Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were made for the same season of television and share a look. Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey and Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco are a ready-made afternoon for children. A Cinderella Story, Another Cinderella Story, A Cinderella Story: Once Upon a Song and A Cinderella Story: If the Shoe Fits tell the same fairy tale four ways, each with a different talent in place of the glass slipper.
For contrast, try Before Sunset with Le Week-End: two couples walking through Paris, one at thirty-two and one past sixty. Or Marty with Enough Said, two films, fifty-eight years apart, about people who had stopped expecting to meet anyone.
The obvious audience is the young. A child's first feature should be short, and the family category offers eighty candidates; Paddington, Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, Madeline and The Borrowers are the gentlest places to begin. Children of school age will enjoy the Wimpy Kid films, Good Burger, Sleepover and Home Team, and teenagers have the Disney Channel shelf, Flipped, Work It, The Perfect Date and The Kings of Summer.
The second audience is anyone with a full day behind them. On a weeknight a film of two and a half hours means either a late bedtime or an unfinished story. A film from the first band can begin at nine and end before half past ten.
The third is the viewer who simply prefers economy. Some people would sooner read a novella than a saga, and they will find in Before Sunset, Wendy and Lucy, Marty and I Know Where I'm Going! films that say exactly what they mean and then stop.
Some directors are naturally brief, and the search box will find them. Charlie Chaplin made The Gold Rush and The Circus. Preston Sturges, who wrote faster dialogue than anyone of his time, made The Palm Beach Story in eighty-eight minutes. Leo McCarey made both The Awful Truth and Make Way for Tomorrow in one year, a comedy and a drama, each just over ninety minutes.
Among later directors, Christopher Guest shaped Best in Show from many hours of improvised scenes and kept only the funniest ninety-one minutes. Richard Linklater held Before Sunset to the length of the walk it shows. Kelly Reichardt, who made Wendy and Lucy, is known for films in which very little is said and everything is understood. Whit Stillman made Love & Friendship, Rob Reiner Flipped, Paul King Paddington and Baz Luhrmann Strictly Ballroom.
John Hughes, the great chronicler of American teenagers, wrote Some Kind of Wonderful and The Great Outdoors. Bill Forsyth wrote and directed Gregory's Girl. Tim Burton began his career with Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and Steve Martin wrote L.A. Story for himself, a love letter to a city in which a motorway sign gives him advice.
A short film can still travel. Paddington and Mr. Bean's Holiday cross from London to France, the second all the way to the film festival at Cannes by accident. Le Week-End, Before Sunset and Passport to Paris are set in Paris, Made in Italy in Tuscany, My Life in Ruins among the temples of Greece and Find Me Falling on a clifftop in Cyprus.
Britain appears in Gregory's Girl, I Know Where I'm Going!, the Austen films, Man Up and Your Christmas or Mine?. Australia is the home of Strictly Ballroom and Penguin Bloom. In America, the guide visits New York in Marty, Serendipity, Little Manhattan and 5 Flights Up, Los Angeles in L.A. Story, Texas in True Stories, the Oregon of Wendy and Lucy and the Mississippi of My Dog Skip.
The furthest journeys are imaginary: the centre of the Earth, a mysterious island, the Klondike of The Gold Rush and whatever kingdom it is that keeps producing unmarried princes in time for Christmas.
The calendar is easily filled. December has its twenty-one Christmas films. Summer has Summer Rental, One Crazy Summer, The Great Outdoors, The Kings of Summer, Teen Beach Movie and Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days. The return to school brings Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life, Candy Jar, Front of the Class and The Ron Clark Story.
Spring is the season of Flipped, Tuck Everlasting and Miss Potter, and a wet autumn afternoon is the right time for a classic: My Man Godfrey or Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, in which Cary Grant and Myrna Loy discover what a country house really costs.
A number of the comedies in the guide grew out of television, and brevity came with them. Bean and Mr. Bean's Holiday carry a character from half-hour sketches to the cinema and wisely keep both films under an hour and a half. Good Burger began as a sketch on a children's comedy programme. Pee-wee's Big Adventure took a stage and television clown on the road.
Old sitcoms were also revived as films in the 1990s. The Brady Bunch Movie places a family of the early 1970s, unchanged in dress and manners, in the middle of 1995 and lets the decade bounce off them. The Beverly Hillbillies returns a mountain clan to their mansion. The Cannonball Run, from 1981, is closer to a variety show than a story, a coast-to-coast car race crowded with famous faces enjoying themselves.
The lesson these films share is that a comic idea has a natural length. A character who delights for twenty-two minutes on television can be stretched to ninety with care, and seldom further.
Three films in the guide pretend to be documentaries, a form that suits a short running time because it depends on a single good idea. Best in Show follows five sets of owners to a championship dog show, with commentary from a television announcer who knows very little about dogs and says so at length. Theater Camp does the same for a children's drama camp in the hills, where the teachers are more theatrical than the pupils.
True Stories is narrated to the camera by a visitor in a cowboy hat who drives round a Texas town meeting its citizens. All three were largely improvised by their casts, and all three are kinder to their subjects than a first glance suggests.
It would be wrong to suppose that short means slight. Several of the briefest films in the guide are also among its most adult in feeling. Make Way for Tomorrow is about an elderly couple whose children have room for only one of them each. Marty is about loneliness and the courage to end it. The Three Faces of Eve won Joanne Woodward an Academy Award in ninety-one minutes.
Le Week-End, 5 Flights Up, Enough Said and And So It Goes are comedies about people in the second half of life, written with experience. Final Portrait is about the difficulty of finishing any piece of work, and Wendy and Lucy about how thin the margin can be between managing and going under. They are all quickly watched and slowly forgotten.
The same holds for I Know Where I'm Going!, in which a young woman certain of her plans is held up by a gale within sight of the island where she means to be married, and has ninety-one minutes to change her mind. Films like these are the reason the guide exists: proof that a story told at the right length feels complete, however small the number on the tag.
My Queue, the last of the dark tabs, is your own list of films to watch. The list button on a film page adds the film, and the Remove button on the list page takes it out again. The queue is kept in the browser on your own device, so it opens at once, and its page can save it as a file. The My Queue page explains each step.
Because the films are short, a queue empties quickly, and that is part of the fun. Five films is a comfortable week of evenings. A good first queue might hold one from each band and two wild cards: Before Sunset, Flipped, Paddington, My Man Godfrey and Best in Show together last seven and a half hours.
Families sometimes keep the queue as a reward chart in reverse: each member adds a film at the start of the month, and the list is worked through one short evening at a time.
A film page on 300mbFilms keeps the plain manner of the posts. The title stands at the head in dark type with the original title beneath it. The poster is set at the left in a thin frame. A row of small labels gives the kind of title, the year, the running time in minutes and the genres. The summary follows in full. The blue Watch now button and the list button come next, and a panel under them holds the country selector with a second button. A table of facts sets out the release date, the original language, the country, the studio and the score out of ten with its number of ratings, which is the same figure that the RATING line of the spec sheet quotes on the home page. The cast is listed with the parts they play, and the director after them, and each name is a link to the other small films in the guide that share it.
The quickest way in is by the clock. Decide how long there is, press the matching tab, and choose from the posters, each of which carries its length. For a first visit the guide suggests one film from each band: Before Sunset at eighty minutes, Flipped at eighty-nine and Paddington at ninety-five.
Those who prefer to choose by mood can use the Categories panel. And anyone who doubts that an hour and a half is enough for a great film is invited to open the Top rated list and start at the top.
300mbFilms is a guide to short feature films. It lists 185 films that run for 95 minutes or less, each with a story line, a spec sheet, its cast and rating and a Watch now button that leads to official services.
Open the film page, choose your country beside the Watch now button and press it. JustWatch then shows the subscription, rental, purchase and free services that carry the film in that country.
Every film is 95 minutes or less. The shortest is The Circus at 72 minutes, and the average across the guide is 90 minutes.
Up to 85 minutes has twenty-six films, 86 to 90 minutes has fifty-six, and 91 to 95 minutes has 103.
It is the grey box in each post with six dotted lines: genre, runtime, year, director, cast and rating. It lets a film be judged at a glance.
The Gold Rush, Flipped, Hachi: A Dog's Tale and Front of the Class all have 8.0. The Circus has 7.9 and Before Sunset 7.8.
The films date from 1925 to 2025. The oldest is The Gold Rush and the newest is The Legend of Ochi.
Every film was screened by hand for a family audience. The family category has eighty films for all ages.
My Queue is your personal list of films to watch. It is kept in the browser on your device and can be saved as a file from the list page.
Posters, ratings, casts and running times are supplied by TMDB, and the links to services come from JustWatch. The guide and help pages are written by the 300mbFilms editorial team.
