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.
“This is Frankie Stossel. A child of God. Was he born to be bad?” the narrator asks in the movie’s opening scene as a newborn baby is smacked into life. Unfortunately there’s no-one around to give this lame 60s morality play a similar kick start. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on October 24th, 2009 at 4:35 pm. Updated on December 11th, 2009 at 8:58 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on October 21st, 2009 at 9:37 pm. Updated on January 11th, 2010 at 10:39 pm.
Of all the film noir prison movies, few match this one in its compelling depiction of the gangster-in-prison still acting like a gangster. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on October 17th, 2009 at 10:45 pm. Updated on October 18th, 2009 at 4:35 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on October 11th, 2009 at 7:19 pm. Updated on October 16th, 2009 at 6:12 am.
As a prison film, this is disappointing. But it’s disappointing because it is so faithful in its retelling of the story of the Georges Bizet opera (or the Prosper Mérimée novella, if you want to go back further), and the film’s prison scenes account for such a tiny proportion of the screen time. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on October 11th, 2009 at 1:23 pm. Updated on August 28th, 2019 at 8:05 pm.
Yeah, it’s a bit schmaltzy at times, but this is an under-rated (or at least undeservedly less well known) addition to the prison sporting contest genre. It has its formulaic elements, too, but is a much better bet than the other rodeo movie of which I’m aware (Stir Crazy, 1980) and the series of The Longest Yard movies (which aren’t about rodeos but take prison sporting events to some very strange places). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on October 4th, 2009 at 6:10 pm. Updated on January 12th, 2010 at 9:06 pm.
I hope that in Arabic the film’s title conveys a little more excitement than the English translation, for this is a half-decent political satire. It doesn’t amount to much as a prison movie, but then it doesn’t need to. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on October 3rd, 2009 at 9:59 pm. Updated on October 13th, 2009 at 8:51 pm.