Prison stuff. In prison movies.
This is your line-and-length type prison movie, scoring awfully high on the cliché count. Which is a shame because it’s co-written by Truman Capote and is filmed grainily on location in a prison in Salt Lake City (I just can’t work out which one) with plenty of prisoners as extras. The backdrop is stunning and the film should be better. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 2:51 pm. Updated on August 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm.
A made-for-TV women’s prison movie that tells a sad, bleak tale, with a certain grittiness to match. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 2:47 pm. Updated on January 1st, 2019 at 9:30 am.
I found this an awfully hard movie to watch. A beautiful young dentist, Rachel Clifford (Julia Ormond), starts working at a London Prison, emotionally vulnerable after the breakdown of her marriage as a result of her husband having an affair. Within hours she has fallen for a manipulative, unattractive prisoner (Tim Roth), and visits him (which surprisingly provokes no reaction at all from staff), meets him on the outside (he is allowed regular leaves to attend a university course, and this facilitates regular assignations) and takes all sorts of risks with him inside the prison (such as sending him audio tapes with her voice on them, trying to ring him, and continually seeing him for dental work – all without arousing suspicion). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 2:43 pm. Updated on August 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm.
Quaint and oddly acclaimed film which is not a prison-based Inferno as the title might lead one to expect. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 2:10 pm. Updated on August 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm.
‘A Song of Love’. Jean Genet had all the credentials to write and direct a prison movie – in his younger years he was a petty thief, vagrant and prostitute and spent a number of years in juvenile and adult penal facilities. This 26-minute, soundless, black & white film draws on some of that experience, and no doubt his experience as a gay man in prison. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 2:04 pm. Updated on May 7th, 2020 at 9:46 pm.
Maybe this isn’t a real prison movie, either. But it’s one for which Susan Sarandon won an Oscar for her portrayal of the dedicated Sister Helen Prejean, who in real life was a Roman Catholic nun who served as spiritual adviser to a killer on Death Row at Louisiana’s Angola State Prison. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 1:56 pm. Updated on August 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm.
This purports to be the true story of Gerry Conlon and the Guildford Four. The Belfast-born Conlon and three others, suspected by Police of being a crack IRA death squad, were convicted of the 1974 Guildford pub bombings, and his father, aunt and other members of her family were convicted of bomb-making. They were arrested just a couple of days after the British Police won new anti-terrorist laws that allowed them to hold terrorism suspects for seven days without charge, and Conlon claimed that Police used that time to beat confessions out of him and his co-accused, with whom he lived briefly in a London squat. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 1:53 pm. Updated on August 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm.
Based on a true story and starring Clint Eastwood as Frank Morris, the mastermind behind the notorious 1962 escape attempt, in which Morris and Clarence and John Anglin managed to escape the island, but no-one really knows if they made it to freedom or perished in the icy waters of San Francisco Bay. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 1:45 pm. Updated on August 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm.
Having been very critical of Midnight Express for its xenophobic vilification of the locals, I was keen to see a slightly more trustworthy portrayal of the Turkish prison system. And the two films are different; while Midnight Express has not one prison guard who is neither corrupt nor brutal, Duvar has… one! Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 1:38 pm. Updated on April 28th, 2020 at 10:14 pm.
A made-for-TV account of the 1971 Attica riot, in which 39 people died – including 25 prisoners and nine guard hostages shot by the State troopers who stormed the prison and ended the four days of rioting. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 1:31 pm. Updated on August 25th, 2009 at 10:37 pm.