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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on November 28th, 2009 at 11:12 pm. Updated on December 11th, 2009 at 8:57 pm.
Also known as ‘You Can’t Beat the Law‘. This is the point at which the treatment of prison reform issues in movies starts to get a bit out of hand. So progressive is the new reformist Warden in this flick that he makes a job offer to an exonerated prisoner even before he’s been released. Prisoner one day, prison guard the next. You may not be able to beat the law, but this shows you can certainly defeat prison logic. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on November 22nd, 2009 at 4:12 pm. Updated on November 22nd, 2009 at 4:12 pm.
Fascinating prison, this. There’s this solid, imposing wall surrounding a maximum-security prison, around which – if I’ve got this right – there are acres and acres of Toronto forest and a scalable, razor-ribbon-topped fence. It’s a prison where prisoners escape over the 7 metre wall with ease, only to routinely get run down by highly trained attack dogs in the foresty bit. No wonder people start asking questions. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on November 16th, 2009 at 9:49 pm. Updated on December 28th, 2010 at 6:59 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on November 14th, 2009 at 11:40 pm. Updated on November 15th, 2009 at 7:45 pm.
I’m not sure whether my favourite bit is when a bullied older prisoner commits suicide after being unfairly denied probation (that’s not the good bit), and the authorities handcuff his corpse as it’s being carried out on a stretcher (the handcuffs sending our hero into a vengeful fury). Or when one of the ‘Gang of Four’ prisoners who run each of the prison wings commits hara-kiri during a one-on-one bout with Ricky, and then tries to strangle his opponent with his intestines. It’s bloody, it’s not high-brow, it doesn’t take itself at all seriously, and it’s mostly good fun. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on November 7th, 2009 at 5:01 pm. Updated on March 25th, 2016 at 11:16 am.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on November 6th, 2009 at 11:54 pm. Updated on April 18th, 2010 at 9:21 pm.
Paul Lamont (Giancarlo Esposito) is a bookish correctional officer working in the most bookish part of Brooklyn’s King’s County House of Detention – the law library. He’s a bit at odds with his fellow guards; he’s studying law at night school, he’s not yet so cynical that he regards every prisoner as scum, he has a middle-class schoolteacher wife, and he thinks a bit too deeply about the impact of what he does at work. He takes his work home with him. In every sense, it turns out. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on November 3rd, 2009 at 9:17 pm. Updated on March 6th, 2016 at 1:14 pm.
This is a film that promises a great deal, and delivers much less. Worse still, it only takes just a few seconds of the opening scene’s awful acting and poor direction to dash any hopes you may have had for it. From time to time it begins to drag itself out of its meandering pointlessness, only to collapse again under the weight of cheap sets and a banal storyline, as if being about an Aboriginal couple in prison and a troubled Aboriginal man is enough. Not all movies need sheer triumph or tragedy to work, but it helps if you care what happens to the characters. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on November 2nd, 2009 at 9:38 pm. Updated on March 5th, 2016 at 10:16 pm.
Mansour Ziaee (Hosein Yari) comes from a little village in Iran’s north, where his family farm sheep. He convinces his parents and his newish wife to sell up and start a new life in Tehran, where they all squeeze into a tiny house. Mansour can work as a welder, but is told by his boss that there is no more work, and to stop ringing him. He’s called a villager, an idiot. His dreams are dashed; he feels betrayed. The next time he sees his boss, on a city street, his picks up a brick and smashes his head in. He is sentenced to death. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on October 26th, 2009 at 8:31 pm. Updated on October 26th, 2009 at 9:34 pm.