Prison stuff. In prison movies.
This is a smouldering love affair spanning prison and life after. It’s often been compared to Brokeback Mountain, with good reason; a man’s world, two seemingly heterosexual men falling in love, and nearly all of it understated or unspoken. (more…)
Posted on March 8th, 2010 at 10:54 am. Updated on March 8th, 2010 at 10:54 am.
This is supposed to be inspired by actual events, but it’s not clear which actual events provided that inspiration. Methinks there’s a liberal dose of artistic licence being splashed about. (more…)
Posted on February 28th, 2010 at 4:00 pm. Updated on February 28th, 2010 at 4:00 pm.
Based on a true story, this follows Peter Madagin, an angry teenager who gets 5 years in an adult prison after a railway engineer dies in the train that he and his mates derail while mucking around, acting tough. It’s hard work empathising with him – so hard, in fact, that the film doesn’t work. Well, that’s just one of the reasons the film doesn’t work. (more…)
Posted on December 26th, 2009 at 9:46 pm. Updated on December 26th, 2009 at 9:46 pm.
There’s a lot to like about this film. It’s got a bit of a thriller element and has a some delightful, hard-bitten, scheming exchanges between the prisoners. But then it seems that the scriptwriters had a collective mental block and came up with an earthquake, of all things, as the means by which the main protagonists are able to effect an escape, even though one of them is already armed with a gun. Still, I suppose it’s more plausible than a meteorite landing on the prison, or invading martians whisking them away. (more…)
Posted on December 6th, 2009 at 4:37 pm. Updated on December 9th, 2009 at 10:29 pm.
Shankar (Rashid Farooqi), a farmer, and his wife Champa (Nandita Das) are Pakistani Hindus from the ‘untouchable’ caste. Their son, Ramchand (Syed Fazal Hussainas the younger boy), is a wilful little brat. He refuses to go to school and complains when his father gets a bigger meal. In a fit of pique he kicks over a cup of tea his mother has poured for him, and storms off… past his father working in the fields and unwittingly across the border into India, where he is immediately captured by the military. His father goes looking for him and he, too, is arrested. Shankar is accused of being a spy, beaten and tortured… and then thrown into prison, along with his 8-year-old son. It’s 2002 and tensions between India and Pakistan are high; it’s not a good time to be straying into enemy territory. And not a particularly good time to be an 8-year-old in an adult prison. (more…)
Posted on November 30th, 2009 at 9:10 pm. Updated on March 25th, 2016 at 11:23 am.
Comedy duo Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey made more than 20 feature films together from 1929 to 1937. Like Laurel & Hardy and The Three Stooges (and the execrable Ernest in more recent times), it was inevitable, I suppose, that at some stage they would set one in a prison. But when one of the early critical scenes in Hold ‘Em Jail involves them being left completely alone in the Warden’s office for quite some time – until they are joined by the Warden’s daughter and sister for some serious flirting – you know that its heart is perhaps not in the prison at all. (more…)
Posted on November 28th, 2009 at 11:12 pm. Updated on December 11th, 2009 at 8:57 pm.
This third offering in the Black Cat series is closer to The Joy Luck Club (1993), it seems, than to the original Black Cat (1991). After the opening five action-packed minutes it’s decidedly light on in derring-do and prison movie-staples such as intimidation, intrigue and violence (although there is some of the latter), preferring to focus on the journeys of four women in prison and the bond they develop. (more…)
Posted on November 14th, 2009 at 11:40 pm. Updated on November 15th, 2009 at 7:45 pm.
This is a neatly packaged, fast-paced war-time prison flick with a sizable piece of the action taking place outside the nick. At 61 minutes, with a robbery, double-crossings, stoolies, a car chase, an escape, a shootout and a romance, at least you’re not sitting around getting bored. (more…)
Posted on November 6th, 2009 at 11:54 pm. Updated on April 18th, 2010 at 9:21 pm.
Eduart (Eshref Durmishi) is a young Albanian who travels to Greece, hoping to become a rock star. He has the looks, but not the talent, it seems. To keep alive, he thieves. He also hustles. At a gay bar, he is picked up and taken home by a rich bloke who is not really his type. He is caught rifling through this bloke’s desk, but that seems to not to dampen the older man’s ardour once an initial attempt to get him to leave is out of the way. Eduart, more appalled than panicked, strangles him and flees. (more…)
Posted on October 21st, 2009 at 9:37 pm. Updated on January 11th, 2010 at 10:39 pm.
This is not a softcore exploitation movie, 1928-style. You’ll find it filed under ‘Gay-Themed Films of the German Silent Era.’ But while it is all of those things, it is also much more: a push for penal reform, a brave contribution to the debate about the purpose of punishment, and some poignant studies in guilt and prisoners’ longing for intimacy. (more…)
Posted on October 11th, 2009 at 7:19 pm. Updated on October 16th, 2009 at 6:12 am.