Prison stuff. In prison movies.
Revenger is an action movie. A fight movie, to be more precise, co-written by the main fighter to showcase his martial-arts skills, not his acting ability. Don’t expect much else. (more…)
Posted on September 21st, 2019 at 10:06 pm. Updated on September 21st, 2019 at 10:06 pm.
I’m not really interested in the nags, despite my great-grandfather having been a highly respected horse-breaker, and like Dr Paul Gendreau I’m a little sceptical of the direct impact that animal programs have on recidivism, no matter what amazing things they can do for the prison environment. But this evocative, beautifully shot film brings two old-fashioned occupations – horse-breaker and criminal – together in splendid fashion, and no-one really gives a toss whether there are fewer criminals in the world because some have learned to break horses. (more…)
Posted on September 3rd, 2019 at 9:31 pm. Updated on September 3rd, 2019 at 9:31 pm.
The fourth movie in the Storm franchise [following on from Z Storm (2014), S Storm (2016), L Storm (2018), from which I have been successfully sheltered in each case, and not counting the yet-to-be-released G Storm], this again features William Luk Chi Lim (Louis Koo) as a super-committed investigator from Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). (more…)
Posted on August 27th, 2019 at 9:57 pm. Updated on August 27th, 2019 at 10:10 pm.
Marco W. etc is based on the true story of 17-year-old Marco Weiss, who was arrested in 2007 on charges of sexual abuse of a 13-year-old English girl during a holiday in Turkey, and who then spent 247 days in Turkish prisons. (more…)
Posted on August 10th, 2019 at 8:21 pm. Updated on August 10th, 2019 at 8:21 pm.
It’s an extraordinary story, this one: based on the real-life story of Clyde Thompson who collected three life sentences, found God in jail, and became a prison chaplain after his release. Maybe because it’s sympathetic to him from the outset, maybe because it is so mindful of its likely audience that the portrayal of his pre-redemption ugliness is never too graphic, or maybe because Clyde never looks anything but boyish – but the message of his transformation is not as powerful as you might imagine; preaching to the converted has its downside. (more…)
Posted on August 5th, 2019 at 9:05 pm. Updated on August 5th, 2019 at 9:05 pm.
Also known as ‘Tonight’s the Night: Pass It On’ and ‘Bill Takes a Holiday’, it seems unlikely that this British comedy will surface in the near future. A 35mm copy is part of the British Film Institute archive collection, but as yet there are no plans to digitise it and viewing access is not made available to film buffs, researchers, stickybeaks or fans of Rod Stewart who think they have chanced upon an early bootleg video of his 1970s hit. (more…)
Posted on July 26th, 2019 at 9:20 pm. Updated on July 26th, 2019 at 9:27 pm.
With a bit more imagination this could be a much better film… and still be pretty awful. (more…)
Posted on July 14th, 2019 at 1:11 pm. Updated on July 14th, 2019 at 1:15 pm.
Also known as ‘Excessive Torture in a Female Prison Camp’ (as distinct from reasonable, permissible torture, of course), this is a film more about love and patriotism than either escape or torture. (more…)
Posted on July 3rd, 2019 at 9:35 pm. Updated on July 3rd, 2019 at 9:45 pm.
The tango. Tango libre. Prison. You’d have to say that they are strange bedfellows, but in this beautifully crafted story, full of passion and tenderness and entanglements and implausibility, they fit together very nicely.
Posted on June 9th, 2019 at 3:45 pm. Updated on June 13th, 2019 at 3:46 pm.
Think of any one of the thousands of shoot-first-ask-questions-later-type cops who are constantly at odds with their superiors for going outside the rules and dispensing rough justice. Then imagine that same cop wanting more than anything to write poetry. Or, when that cop happens to be a prison Jailor and has single-handedly recaptured (with transactional violence) eight of his prisoners who have escaped, him saying of them, “Living inside four walls is not enough (for them) to become good. They should be living amongst good people, but they can’t find any good people here.” (more…)
Posted on March 11th, 2019 at 3:37 pm. Updated on June 13th, 2019 at 3:38 pm.