Das Boot

Wolfgang Petersen, 1981 (suom. "Sukellusvene U-96")

This film is quite thoroughly praised all around so I'll rather skip that. What I remarked, however, was the same effect that Seven Samurai had when we once watched this film with my then-girlfriend's girls, aged 4, 9 and 11. We watched the whole director's cut in a single session, and although this might sound like a parental crime: not once during the 5 hours (of a German-spoken war film directed inside a single submarine) was me nor any of the girls bored or tired but kept following the plot and the greatly depicted characters intensely and talking about the characters and the events in the film (only the very end we skipped with the girls and concluded with "...and they all lived happily ever after"). I take this as a quite clear sign that there's something very very special in the direction and/or acting: the set-up qualifies the criteria of eternal boredom but the result is the opposite... for viewers of any age.

Note: someone might raise an upbringing concern about the suitability of the language in such a film for children, but I don't see girls copying any German curse words and they will learn to curse in Finnish well enough in junior high.