Earlier this year, I screwed up and strolled into a screening of“Creed III”30 minutes late. I watched the movie to the end, and afterward, the publicists were nice enough to show me the part I’d missed, and I came away surprised.

In terms of story, I had missed nothing. Almost everything in the first 30 minutes could have been easily inferred from the remaining 86. Without that first half hour, the movie might have lost some atmosphere and detail, but it’s debatable whether the gain of all those particulars was worth the movie’s loss in velocity.

For at least the last 2,000 years, the running time for plays (and later, movies) has mainly ranged from around 70 minutes to three hours. Yet within those ranges, each era has had its own tendencies. In the 1940s, the average play took place over three acts and, with intermissions, could easily run three hours, while most movies topped out at 100 minutes.

相比之下,这些天却缩短了and movies longer. Filmmakers signal they’re making movies of importance by stretching them to two hours, and epics get stretched closer to three.

Sometimes the exaggerated length feels appropriate (“Oppenheimer”), and sometimes itkindof makes sense (“Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” at 163 minutes). But more often, even good movies have extra minutes that shouldn’t be there. The 153-minute “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” dragged in the middle, and even Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” which clocked in at a reasonable 114 minutes, had at least five minutes and one production number too many.

That’s why it’s refreshing to see two major filmmakers —Wes AndersonandPedro Almodóvar— bucking that trend by releasing short films. Instead of saying, “All right, I have to get this thing to two hours so people will take it seriously,” they’re letting the film tell them how long it wants to be. Rather than tailoring the artwork to some predetermined frame, they’re tailoring the frame to the artwork.

Anderson’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” now streaming on Netflix, is a 39-minute adaptation of a Roald Dahl story, starring Benedict Cumberbatch andBen Kingsley. It’s colorful and clever, and the artistic worlds of Dahl and Anderson blend so well that you could easily believe you’re watching a story of Anderson’s own creation.

在导演的成熟的风格,”亨利Sugar” is a mixture of stylized, artificial sets and brisk, deadpan recitation of dialogue. But the fact that it’s a short film isn’t surprising, because it was based on a short story and thus had a defined form going in. Anderson could have stretched it out, but wisely did not.

Almodóvar’s “Strange Way of Life,” in theaters Friday, Oct. 6, is more interesting, in that he clearly had enough material here for a full-length movie. Running only 31 minutes, it starsEthan HawkeandPedro Pascalas a sheriff and a cowboy, respectively, who meet up in the Old West after 25 years. The men have a complicated history, and the story unfolds from there.

The fascinating thing about it is that Almodóvar not only starts “Strange Way of Life” in the middle, but he ends it in the middle. Yet he does so in a way that we know everything that went before and everything that’s going to happen afterward.

Why didn’t he film the beginning? Why didn’t he show the end? I imagine it must have been tempting, but clearly something within Almodóvar told him that this is the form his movie had to take.

The point here is the obvious one: Longer is not always better, and it’s often worse.

But the more specific point is that it’s OK for filmmakers tonotshow things. It’s OK to play with narrative and suggest. Watch “Strange Way of Life” to see what the face of a good actor can tell you about a past you never see — and a future you don’t need to witness.

Reach Mick LaSalle: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com