Despite our best efforts to go into a film completely blind, sometimes we’ll catch online chatter or a snippet of a promotional interview that inevitably colors something about our first viewing of an anticipated movie. It could be gossip about stars not getting along that might affect your perception of their onscreen rapport, or the knowledge that a director was replaced by someone else partway into production due to creative differences.

In the arthouse world, a perhaps surprising example of game-changing pre-release context has emerged with Filipino independent filmmaker Lav Diaz and his latest movie, “Magellan.” But befitting the man behind several of the longest narrative films on record (e.g. “Evolution of a Filipino Family”), the bombshell in question is that “Magellan” — one of his shortest features of late at 160-ish minutes — was apparently intended to be nine hours in length. And that a nine-hour version may still be on the way,...