Silviu Chiscan (George Pi?tereanu) is 18 and in the process of being reformed by the Romanian State. He has just 15 days of his sentence left to serve. Everything is good. He is then visited by his much younger brother, Marius, whom he had helped raise in the absence of their mother, who had seemingly found her children inconvenient whenever a new man came on the scene. That may have been quite often. Marius tells him that their mother has returned (after 8 years away) and wants to return to Italy in 7 days and take Marius with her. Silviu, up until then easy-going and likable, unravels. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on July 3rd, 2010 at 3:27 pm. Updated on July 3rd, 2010 at 3:36 pm.
With all the fuss about 2009’s Un Prophète being a prison movie masterpiece – if not a masterpiece in any genre – this less celebrated Spanish prison film may have been overlooked. It might not be in the same class – it’s certainly no masterpiece – but there’s an awful lot to like. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on June 27th, 2010 at 5:15 pm. Updated on August 29th, 2019 at 8:47 pm.
Why is it that when someone writes an autobiography we allow them to reflect glowingly on their contribution to the world, and yet when they write and produce a movie of that very same life it smacks of tacky self-indulgence and bald self-promotion? Harold Morris certainly doesn’t know the answer. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on June 20th, 2010 at 2:48 pm. Updated on June 20th, 2010 at 2:48 pm.
There are more films about Attica, it seems, than any other correctional event. This is not the best of them, nor the worst. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on June 15th, 2010 at 10:42 pm. Updated on June 15th, 2010 at 10:42 pm.
This remake of The Criminal Code (1931) and precursor to Convicted (1950) is a solid story, well told… notwithstanding that if John Howard’s performance as the young prisoner William Jordan were any more wooden, it would be a tree. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on June 14th, 2010 at 12:48 pm. Updated on June 14th, 2010 at 12:48 pm.
Also known as ‘The Other Side of Love‘, this starts like so many uninspired B-grade films about innocent men or women in prison, but it rallies to say a few fresh things about the toll that imprisonment takes on prisoners’ families left on the outside. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on June 12th, 2010 at 10:25 pm. Updated on June 12th, 2010 at 10:25 pm.
“It was a dreary day when Roger Manners saw the gates of the prison open. Gates that were to close and deprive him of a world of free men. And here he was to become familiar with the clang of pails against steel doors, the smell of disinfectant in the cell blocks, and mark the time of night by the cries of the watchmen calling the hours.” So narrates the actor Warden of the Nevada State Penitentiary in Carson City, where the film was shot. Sententious rubbish, really. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on June 12th, 2010 at 3:57 pm. Updated on June 12th, 2010 at 3:57 pm.
I was ready for this movie to be a bit dorky, a bit ’80s, a bit made-for-TV. What I wasn’t prepared for, having watched it and wondered why so many of the plot lines just seemed to evaporate, was to find that it wasn’t made as a film at all. It turns out to be bits of a 1984 TV series (of which there were only two or three episodes), cobbled together in 2002 into a single, slightly dorky, ’80s, made-for-DVD movie. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on June 6th, 2010 at 4:57 pm. Updated on June 6th, 2010 at 4:57 pm.
Comparisons with the powerful Scum are both inevitable and justified, with the writers of that bleak 1979 movie following up here with a companion piece on a female borstal. It’s a little less critical of the system; the staff, for a start, are much less brutal and much less complicit in perpetuating the rule of brutality within the detainee group. But it’s still an uncomfortable viewing experience. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 30th, 2010 at 8:15 pm. Updated on May 30th, 2010 at 8:15 pm.
This is an exploitation movie, of a different kind. 1930s-style. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 30th, 2010 at 8:06 pm. Updated on May 30th, 2010 at 8:06 pm.