What I’d read about Harmony suggested that it was an uplifting movie about a choir in a women’s prison. Is it uplifting? I guess so… for a moment or two. But it is also just about the saddest prison movie that you will see, full of pain and loss and suffering. It could be three films: one about the choir, another about the harsh separation of a mother from her young child, and yet another about the senseless execution of a kindly, elderly woman. Very uplifting. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on February 16th, 2013 at 7:46 pm. Updated on February 16th, 2013 at 8:04 pm.
I’d ignored this for years, believing it to be a prisoner-of war movie (a genre I am – for no discernible reason – at great pains to avoid), until it was very sensibly pointed out that despite it being set in a prison which holds only soldiers, it is “not POW, but actually a detention centre for English soldiers who (have behaved) badly. Ergo, prison!” It’s true; in my ignorance I had neglected a truly magnificent prison flick. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on February 13th, 2013 at 8:59 pm. Updated on August 29th, 2019 at 8:41 pm.
This made-for-TV film was adapted from Daniel Keene’s stage play, and examines some awkwardly dysfunctional relationships in a troubled family in the context of a condemned man’s last hours. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on February 8th, 2013 at 8:59 pm. Updated on December 6th, 2013 at 9:27 pm.
You’d think that in a film of a little over an hour it would be difficult to make the action drag. But this achieves it, somehow. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 31st, 2013 at 8:31 pm. Updated on January 31st, 2013 at 8:31 pm.
Let’s make it clear from the outset: this is not a campy remake of Girls in Prison (1956). I wish it were. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 27th, 2013 at 9:17 pm. Updated on January 27th, 2013 at 9:17 pm.
By the time The Hurricane was made, American moviegoers were already well used to the brutality of the French penal colonies from films such as Condemned! (1927) and Escape from Devil’s Island (1935). This provides another opportunity to take a swipe at the French for their administration of justice (and management of their overseas territories), this time in French Polynesia. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 20th, 2013 at 6:59 pm. Updated on January 20th, 2013 at 6:59 pm.
Some movies just make you feel old. I hadn’t seen any of the previous 7,069 Naruto manga or anime (or any of the previous seven films) which might have helped, but I still had this unsettling sense, as I struggled to keep up with the plot, of 7-year-old Japanese kids (any 7-year-old kids, really) taking it all in with ease. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 16th, 2013 at 9:01 pm. Updated on January 16th, 2013 at 9:01 pm.
I think I breathed a sigh of relief on coming to the end of H3: “Thankfully, that might be the last of these that I have to watch.” Which is a bit bewildering, because I’ve found other films dealing with the dirty protests and hunger strikes by republican prisoners in Northern Ireland in the early 80s [such as Silent Grace (2001) and Hunger (2008)] very watchable. It wasn’t any aspect of the conflict that troubled me, and it certainly wasn’t the repetition in the storyline; I can’t recall having a similar reaction after seeing my 67th escape movie or innocent-man-in-prison movie. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 11th, 2013 at 9:37 pm. Updated on January 11th, 2013 at 9:37 pm.
My problem with this movie is this: When you show a succession of unexceptional hoods scheming, thugging, racketeering and mowing down rivals in cold blood, why would you expect anyone to care what happens to them? Even when they turn on their former colleagues, as is the case in this long and rather tedious film. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 6th, 2013 at 7:22 pm. Updated on January 6th, 2013 at 7:22 pm.
Internet synopses aren’t exactly at their most reliable on this one. “A tough street kid takes the rap for a burglary committed by the son of his foster family and is sent to a boys’ reformatory, where the inmates are under the thumb of corrupt guards and a brutal prison doctor,” they say. Well, firstly, the kid talks tough but he’s not a street kid. And the guards aren’t corrupt, the inmates aren’t under the thumb and the doctor is far, far from brutal. Otherwise, it’s spot on. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on December 30th, 2012 at 8:55 pm. Updated on December 30th, 2012 at 8:58 pm.