> There’s a feeling in Hollywood that audiences have short attention spans and must be assaulted with fresh novelties. I think such movies are slower to sit through than a film like “Shawshank,” which absorbs us and takes away the awareness that we are watching a film.
This resonates with me and is a really concise way to explain why, to me, a 2 to 2.5 hour long Marvel or Transformers movie feels like an eternity, while a movie like Shawshank never has me checking my watch.
Ghibli movies are a different class of movies, but the exact thing that you describe "absorbs us and takes away the awareness that we are watching a film" is what happends to me. The story is so intriguing that I even "forget" that I'm watching a painted movie.
The particular niche of television Vince Gilligan has carved out for himself is endlessly fascinating to me.
With three shows over the course of 20 years, each more detached from the sensationalism of its predecessor, he (and it must be said, the creative team surrounding him, usually more than half women) has trained an audience to appreciate slower TV that takes its time and nevertheless works from moment to moment. On this count alone, he has my undying respect, as I think it's the biggest sort of success an artist can hope to have, to advance your point of view and come to be valued for it in itself.
I agree with sibling that Kurosawa does this very well.
My take: Marvel movies have a loooot going on. That might just be draining after a while, since the human brain isn’t wired for constant arousal. Old school action movies are still quite fun to watch and don’t felt that long, perhaps because were given time to ‘rest and digest’ the action.
Marvel has no clue, just keeps pumping and pumping. I especially liked the animated Spider-Man movies, but am super tired of a 2.5h smorgasbord of nonstop action. Even John Wick has a cadence.
I made the mistake of watching Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. I just could not keep up and walked out early on. They had dialed everything to 11 and never let up.
I think a part of it is down to demographics with disposable income. Teenagers have a taste of freedom and some pocket money and the next gimmick films is a good way to spend it. It's the same as they mature into 20 somethings. In their 30's they may be more career focused and have less time, a good chunk of them will tire of novelty and move towards more interesting/arthouse films. When kids come into the picture there's even less time and money so things change again, then the cycle repeats.
So, at least from my opinion, "new" will always be a good sales tactic to catch attention.
Kurosawa did this better than anyone. He could make you sit through 2.5 hours of grinding drama and make it feel like barely 5 minutes have passed. Ran (1985) was like that.
This is one of my favorite movies, yet it won 0 Oscars (nominated for 7) and was a box office flop (cost $25M to make and box office proceeds were $28M). It only gained popularity after the theatres from the VHS rental market.
I firmly believe part of the initial commercial failure was because of the title. With something more descriptive like, "Escape from Shawshank" or just "Prison Break" people would have been more interested to see it.
For the academy awards, to its defense, it was competing against Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Four Weddings and a Funeral, or the Madness of King George. I can barely name one good movie a year these days, and certainly none that makes it to the oscars. The contrast with the 90s is brutal.
> can barely name one good movie a year these days
Not really.
Of the recent movies, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a storytelling masterpiece. Since you mentioned it, I personally rate it alongside Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
The translations of the title (Finnish, Greek, others?) referencing Rita Hayworth make more sense if you know the title of Stephen King's novella the movie was based on (Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption).
Reminds me of the Luc Besson film "Leon", which also went by the names "The Professional" and also "Leon: The Professional". A great film but there was definitely something going on in regards to getting crowds interested purely by messing with the title of the film.
Confound: I think one of that film's themes made people deeply uncomfortable, and it was not hidden from the marketing as far as I know. I was a bit put off by its execution myself, even though there's really nothing untoward about it on a factual level.
In Greece it was released as "Τελευταία έξοδος: Ρίτα Χέιγουορθ" literally "Last Exit: Rita Hayworth". People were saying, jokingly, that the title was a spoiler.
the italian dubbing was named "le ali della libertà" (the wings of freedom), which is one of the rare cases where I agree with using a different name than the original, since nobody would have clue what "Shawshank" means.
> With something more descriptive like, "Escape from Shawshank" or just "Prison Break" people would have been more interested to see it.
But maybe that would have killed the real market for people who wanted a deep subtle movie.
Despite its disappointing box-office returns ...
...It went on to become the top rented film of that year.
also
While finances for licensing the film for television are unknown, in 2014, current and former Warner Bros. executives confirmed that it was one of the highest-valued assets in the studio's $1.5 billion library.
In the US, my experience correlates with the rise of TNT and cable television - Ted Turner bought the rights to show certain films on his new cable channels and “Shawshank” got heavy rotation. It was akin to “background noise” sometimes. Others can probably recall the frequency.
Based on a Stephen King short story, I’m a fan. Never did catch “The Majestic” and no interest. Ebert was a national treasure, great share.
As with most self-congratulatory inter-industry awards, the Oscars are mostly a joke. Obviously, lots of good films get recognition from The Academy but you can glance at the number of titles in any given year winning piles of Oscars and then disappearing into the mists of time because they were trash that hit all the buttons and played the game.
The most notorious of recent memory is Crash, a film you probably haven't heard of if you're just casually into film (or a sicko like me lol)
> [...]and the redemption, when it comes, is Red’s.
(spoilers)
It never sat right with me that Andy is shown to be innocent, and some viciously evil irrelevant character did it instead. This, I thought, takes away the whole redemption aspect of the movie, turning Andy into an innocent Mary Sue. I'd never considered that it may be more about Red's character instead. Though I didn't catch a satisfying explanation for that idea in the review, and it's been a long time since I watched the move.
Andy has to be innocent for his escape (and bringing down of the warden) to be a redemption. It's a redemption of his life against the injustice he was subjected to, not a redemption of his soul for some evil that he committed.
If he was a double murderer, plotting to and successfully escaping isn't a redemption, it's just a murderer getting away with it.
I rewatched the movie now, and I think you're right. There were a lot of details I'd forgotten.
The way I remember thinking about it was that he was jailed for revenge murder, then spent his life in jail doing his best to atone by being helpful (building a library, teaching, helping with taxes, etc.). When the prison system refuses to set him free despite him proving through his actions in prison that he's not a threat to society anymore (I hallucinated this part -- this happened to Red, not Andy), he escapes, and his freedom is his redemption.
I'm not a native English speaker, and I think I may have conflated redemption and atonement. Looking at some definitions, it looks like you can receive redemption without atonement -- it doesn't necessarily have to come from within.
Cool Hand Luke, which I prefer, has its protagonist sentenced to a work camp for an absurd crime.
A more recent prison movie which made me feel similarly to Cool Hand Luke and Shawshank Redemption while watching it is "I Love You Phillip Morris" (starring Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor).
Andy is by no means innocent, he’s just not guilty of any crime he should have been imprisoned in Shawshank for.
The guy who sits drunk in his car eyeing a revolver is not a Mary Sue. And his demeanor of resignation at Shawshank suggests he doesn’t consider himself just an unlucky victim of blind fate & a golf pro.
It was my first movie about prison life in the US and the failures of the American justice and correctional system. I since learned it was realistic in every aspect apart from the escape, and that not much has changed since.
Everything about it is depressing and somehow it’s the best movie ever.
This generation will never experience the joy of flipping on network tv on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, seeing Shawshank on, sitting down and just watching it, even though you’ve seen it countless times and it’s the tv-edited commercial filled version.
I lived in Germany, and movies are dubbed there, so the TV stayed mostly off. I did turn on the TV once. There was a movie that looked half interesting, so I focused on it. The scene was two guys at the airport to pick up a girl who they had a crush on in highschool. They're waiting for her at the arrivals. "There she is!", cut to... not the girl walking in looking all glorius, but a beer ad. I turned it off and looked for the movie on Torrent.
Coincidentally there is an interview with Roger Deakins, who did the cinematography on Shawshank, as well as many other excellent films, in The Guardian today.
A great complement to that article is the Team Deakins podcast, where Roger Deakins and James Deakins talk about cinematography, filmmaking and the business of film.
Quite a few classics like this and "Office Space" were box office flops that were resurrected by the magic of VHS/DVD. Yet those are gone too. Is there any room left for the "sleeper hit" in 2026?
There's no space left for actual hits. Movies aren't even given proper theatrical releases. One week at the theater then straight to streaming, or even simultaneous theater and streaming releases.
Features are in decline and theater releases are doomed; they're in the agonal breathing stage already. But against that you have the rise of series, which arguably a better storytelling medium.
That's not a sleeper hit, it became the most watched animation ever on Netflix 1 month after the release and then the most watched film ever after 2 months.
I feel that anyone that has ever suffered an injustice (and who hasn’t at some time or another) can relate to this film. And survivors of all kinds can understand what it means to “crawl through a river of shit” to earn their reprieve.
"Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" is one of my favourite Stephen King short stories (From "Different Seasons"). I actually read it after watching the film (which is just amazing) and still ended up liking the short story more than the film. I would highly recommend it to just about anyone.
Roger Ebert was a national treasure. The saga of his review of director Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny" [1] always makes me laugh:
> American critic Roger Ebert has hit back at Vincent Gallo in the latest round of a public spat over whether the actor-director did or did not apologise for his derided Cannes contender The Brown Bunny. Earlier this week Gallo denied having apologised and claimed the critic was "a fat pig" for saying that he had. He added: "The only thing I'm sorry for is putting a curse of Roger Ebert's colon."
> Yesterday, in his column for the Chicago Sun Times, Ebert stuck to his guns - quoting the editor of trade magazine Screen International, who says that they have Gallo's apology on tape. On the question of his cursed colon, Ebert said: "I am not too worried. I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny."
> The critic rounded off his article (as it were) by casually conceding that he is overweight. "It is true that I am fat," Ebert wrote. "But one day I shall be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny."
Later on, Gallo went back to the editing room and cut a quarter of the film. Ebert re-watched it and actually ended up giving it a thumbs' up.
Roger Ebert writing style was so polished. I wish I could write like this. My writing tends to be quite dry to the extent that GPTzero flagged it as written by AI. The reason given was "the lack of a creative use of grammar."
On a separate note, although vastly different, Fight Club was also not very successful on the box office (domestically made losses) but became a hit on DVDs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club)
In my opinion, the costs to make movies have gone down so much that you will find sincerity not only in high production value releases but also in YouTube and vlogs.
It’s not the cost of movies going down as budgets keep going up. It is the cost of consumer video equipment that has lowered the bar to entry for production. Video equipment never looked as good a film until digital sensors and high speed storage. Not having a delay of getting film exposed and being able to see playback immediately after stopping the camera also lowers expenses.
I recently saw it as a play in a theater, and although I had my reservations regarding this, the result was an interesting experience. The minimalist staging shifted the focus to the performances and the emotional weight of the story, highlighting the quiet persistence of hope.
The title of the play also differed from the movie, Rita Hayworth: Last Exit, which feels somewhat like a spoiler. I believe this was the title used by the Greek distributor.
It's a fine movie, agreed. The movie's focus isn't on revenge, but on the interaction between the protagonists. Anyways, the story outline heavily reminds me of the classic "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Dumas.
There’s a scene in the movie directly acknowledging this when they are sorting the books for the expanded library. Heywood calls it the Count of Monte Crisco by Alexandree Dumbass and Andy says it’s about a prison break. Heywood then suggests it should go in the educational section.
In 1995, our art teacher used a full week of class time to screen this for us, for no other reason than she felt it was an incredible film that deserved a wider audience. She was right.
this type of thing happens quite often. I can only guess that part of the page is automated or farmed out because I see it all the time, main actors not credited when the list is 4-6 people.
This was co-produced with Russ Meyer, who basically made a bunch films which are as close to porn as you can get without being technically porn. He also made a ton of porn films as well. I haven't seen any of them, but many are now cult films. It feels debatable that he intended these to become cultural relics.
I was surprised to see Roger Ebert was involved in that film! Gene Siskel, his long time partner, rated Valley of the Dolls 0 out of 4 stars, which is funny.
What’s an equivalent movie in contemporary times? Not pretentious, sincere and relies on dialogue and story telling?
I kind of hated movies like Manchester By The Sea, American Sniper, Banshees of Insherin.
They all feel not so sincere to me. There’s something about them - a technique where audience exposition is deliberately toned down to such an extent that it’s just scene after scene with no soul.
It is an objective fact though that the lack of DVD sales on the backend has completely changed the economics of movies and what gets made.
You also can't really compare the 90s to now when music and the movies were the dominate art form and there was no way to get rich and famous from just the internet.
I watched an interview with Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains and he said in the late 80s Seatle, he worked at a giant 50 room rehearsal space, almost apartment complex, that was opened 24/7. Music can't be the same as a time when being in a band was so popular that the economics could support a 50 band room rehearsal space that never closes. It is night and day different to now. Same with movies.
Japanese films are notoriously bad. You found a few gems. They are rare. This topic comes up often in Japanese learning groups.
There's also just personal takes. I had to shut off Memories of Matsuko. Maybe the end saves it but it was way too over the top and not in a good way.
Some good older Japanese though
Kurasawa: Ikiru (1955)
Teshigahara: Woman in the Dunes (1964)
These are 2 movies you won't forget.
Conversely, even though I enjoyed Shoplifters I remember nothing about it except the guy celebrating he had sex and the girl burping. Similarly with After Life. I just watched it 2 months ago and had to go look it up to remember what it was about. It was interesting because of the premise but not because of the movie itself.
You can't mention Kore-eda without mentioning After Life (1998), surely? (Confusingly called Wonderful Life in Japanese, and also I don't mean the Gervais series.)
There's a recent US "remake"/homage which I haven't dared to watch.
You're looking for story-driven movies and setting the bar at Shawshank, which is IMDB's all-time most popular movie, so that's kind of a tall order.
You're also rattling off three movies that have almost nothing to do with each other. Banshees of Inisherin in particular isn't a crowd-pleasing movie. To stick with Martin McDonagh, check out In Bruges or Three Billboards. I didn't like American Sniper either (it's Temu Hurt Locker), but sticking with Clint Eastwood, check out Gran Torino.
Banshees of Insherin is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. The understatedness is critical to the humor and story; it’s a juxtaposition of boring people in a boring town and the batshit plots that develop.
Other recent greats are maybe Poor Things, Challengers, and Conclave.
You wouldn’t mistake any for Shawshank, but that’s ok, it’s 30 years later. Shawshank is also qualitatively different from great movies in the mid 1960’s, like Dr. Strangelove or The Graduate.
I think this opens a huge can of further questions: what is a Stephen King?
Is it a best selling author who's a house name, a very successful genre author, one who spans genres and is successful in all of them, one whose' books get regularly translated to TV, a very good craftman of books that people actually read...
My feeling is that there isn't and _won't be_ a new Stephen King that checks all the boxes, due to declining readership and reduced barriers to independent publishing.
About Dry Grasses by Nuri Ceylan. Probably the best film I’ve seen in the past 10 years, which isn’t saying that much because the past 10 years have been among the worst in the history of film, but it’s still a very good movie.
> It is a strange comment to make about a film set inside a prison, but “The Shawshank Redemption” creates a warm hold on our feelings because it makes us a member of a family. Many movies offer us vicarious experiences and quick, superficial emotions. “Shawshank” slows down and looks. It uses the narrator’s calm, observant voice to include us in the story of men who have formed a community behind bars. It is deeper than most films; about continuity in a lifetime, based on friendship and hope.
I think Ebert is a brilliant reviewer; here I think something is overlooked: I agree about the emotional tone but not about the effect or the truth behind it. The prison is a fearful, traumatic place, of rape you can't stop, where life hangs by a thread, you take risks (for example with the bookkeeping) living on a razor's edge. The constant danger hangs over everything - you might not survive the day, you might be assaulted again, today might be the day they look more closely at what you're doing and you're caught.
That belies the calm narration and friendship. They provide an island of hope and love amid the trauma, in stark contrast to it, in constant tension with it.
You might say the narration is a device to make it palatable to middle-class audiences. That's something I notice a lot in Hollywood. First, the protagonist is someone they can identify with - a banker, a middle-class job - wrongly convicted, in this horrible situation. They are not, for example, a homeless person or someone semi-employed doing manual labor (someone much more likely to be wrongly convicted) - that would be a different movie and much less empathetic for many viewers, though objectively exactly as horrible. Then you have this calm, warm, reasonable voice telling the story - not a voice of terror or hate or trauma; that would be too much; the voice says 'it's ok'.
As Ebert says,
> The movie avoids lingering on Andy’s suffering; after beatings, he’s seen in medium and long shot, tactfully. The camera doesn’t focus on Andy’s wounds or bruises, but, like his fellow prisoners, gives him his space.
And I think also the following claim goes much too far:
> His film grants itself a leisure that most films are afraid to risk. The movie is as deliberate, considered and thoughtful as Freeman’s narration. There’s a feeling in Hollywood that audiences have short attention spans and must be assaulted with fresh novelties.
Sure, it's not the Avengers but it's a movie where the main plot elements are prison violence, a prison escape, and a grand con. This isn't Tokyo Story or In the Mood for Love.
> There’s a feeling in Hollywood that audiences have short attention spans and must be assaulted with fresh novelties. I think such movies are slower to sit through than a film like “Shawshank,” which absorbs us and takes away the awareness that we are watching a film.
This resonates with me and is a really concise way to explain why, to me, a 2 to 2.5 hour long Marvel or Transformers movie feels like an eternity, while a movie like Shawshank never has me checking my watch.
Ghibli movies are a different class of movies, but the exact thing that you describe "absorbs us and takes away the awareness that we are watching a film" is what happends to me. The story is so intriguing that I even "forget" that I'm watching a painted movie.
Spirited Away contains an accurate review of itself in the title!
I like the use of happends in this context, a good mixture of tenses
Slow media or die!
The particular niche of television Vince Gilligan has carved out for himself is endlessly fascinating to me.
With three shows over the course of 20 years, each more detached from the sensationalism of its predecessor, he (and it must be said, the creative team surrounding him, usually more than half women) has trained an audience to appreciate slower TV that takes its time and nevertheless works from moment to moment. On this count alone, he has my undying respect, as I think it's the biggest sort of success an artist can hope to have, to advance your point of view and come to be valued for it in itself.
I agree with sibling that Kurosawa does this very well.
My take: Marvel movies have a loooot going on. That might just be draining after a while, since the human brain isn’t wired for constant arousal. Old school action movies are still quite fun to watch and don’t felt that long, perhaps because were given time to ‘rest and digest’ the action.
Marvel has no clue, just keeps pumping and pumping. I especially liked the animated Spider-Man movies, but am super tired of a 2.5h smorgasbord of nonstop action. Even John Wick has a cadence.
I made the mistake of watching Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. I just could not keep up and walked out early on. They had dialed everything to 11 and never let up.
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I think a part of it is down to demographics with disposable income. Teenagers have a taste of freedom and some pocket money and the next gimmick films is a good way to spend it. It's the same as they mature into 20 somethings. In their 30's they may be more career focused and have less time, a good chunk of them will tire of novelty and move towards more interesting/arthouse films. When kids come into the picture there's even less time and money so things change again, then the cycle repeats.
So, at least from my opinion, "new" will always be a good sales tactic to catch attention.
"it was long at 142 minutes"
How times have changed
Kurosawa did this better than anyone. He could make you sit through 2.5 hours of grinding drama and make it feel like barely 5 minutes have passed. Ran (1985) was like that.
This is one of my favorite movies, yet it won 0 Oscars (nominated for 7) and was a box office flop (cost $25M to make and box office proceeds were $28M). It only gained popularity after the theatres from the VHS rental market.
I firmly believe part of the initial commercial failure was because of the title. With something more descriptive like, "Escape from Shawshank" or just "Prison Break" people would have been more interested to see it.
For the academy awards, to its defense, it was competing against Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Four Weddings and a Funeral, or the Madness of King George. I can barely name one good movie a year these days, and certainly none that makes it to the oscars. The contrast with the 90s is brutal.
Train Dreams
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> can barely name one good movie a year these days
Not really.
Of the recent movies, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a storytelling masterpiece. Since you mentioned it, I personally rate it alongside Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
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The Finnish importer tried this. They decided to call the movie “Rita Hayworth – avain pakoon”. It means “Key to the escape”…
These people would have presumably called Planet of the Apes “Distant future in Eastern United States”…
On a tangent the movie Cold Mountain (2003) was translated to "Åter till Cold Mountain" in Swedish.
Now you may ask, where is the actual translation? They just added Swedish words to the original title (which just means back to Cold Mountain".
Who are these people and how do I apply for a job? It seems like a perfect workplace.
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The translations of the title (Finnish, Greek, others?) referencing Rita Hayworth make more sense if you know the title of Stephen King's novella the movie was based on (Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption).
Reminds me of the Luc Besson film "Leon", which also went by the names "The Professional" and also "Leon: The Professional". A great film but there was definitely something going on in regards to getting crowds interested purely by messing with the title of the film.
Confound: I think one of that film's themes made people deeply uncomfortable, and it was not hidden from the marketing as far as I know. I was a bit put off by its execution myself, even though there's really nothing untoward about it on a factual level.
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Escape from Shawshank - that how the movie is called in Russian
In Greece it was released as "Τελευταία έξοδος: Ρίτα Χέιγουορθ" literally "Last Exit: Rita Hayworth". People were saying, jokingly, that the title was a spoiler.
I wonder whether they were showing this film, with this title, in the “morning shows” :/
the italian dubbing was named "le ali della libertà" (the wings of freedom), which is one of the rare cases where I agree with using a different name than the original, since nobody would have clue what "Shawshank" means.
No one in the US knows, either. It’s a fictional prison and its name means nothing except to people already familiar with the story.
“The Shawshank Redemption” is a nonsense phrase in English.
“Shawshank” sounds like a place name, but why a specific place would be the source of redemption is mysterious.
The name of the source text, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” is even more mysterious and unclear.
They could have called it "An Accounting of Justice" which works in several ways at the same time.
In Brazil it was released as A Dream of Freedom. Gotta say it took me years to learn the original title.
In hungarian it's translated into "prisoners of hope" (A remény rabjai) which I think is pretty good even though I despise dubbing
> With something more descriptive like, "Escape from Shawshank" or just "Prison Break" people would have been more interested to see it.
But maybe that would have killed the real market for people who wanted a deep subtle movie.
Despite its disappointing box-office returns ...
...It went on to become the top rented film of that year.
also
While finances for licensing the film for television are unknown, in 2014, current and former Warner Bros. executives confirmed that it was one of the highest-valued assets in the studio's $1.5 billion library.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shawshank_Redemption
In the US, my experience correlates with the rise of TNT and cable television - Ted Turner bought the rights to show certain films on his new cable channels and “Shawshank” got heavy rotation. It was akin to “background noise” sometimes. Others can probably recall the frequency.
Based on a Stephen King short story, I’m a fan. Never did catch “The Majestic” and no interest. Ebert was a national treasure, great share.
As with most self-congratulatory inter-industry awards, the Oscars are mostly a joke. Obviously, lots of good films get recognition from The Academy but you can glance at the number of titles in any given year winning piles of Oscars and then disappearing into the mists of time because they were trash that hit all the buttons and played the game.
The most notorious of recent memory is Crash, a film you probably haven't heard of if you're just casually into film (or a sicko like me lol)
> [...]and the redemption, when it comes, is Red’s.
(spoilers)
It never sat right with me that Andy is shown to be innocent, and some viciously evil irrelevant character did it instead. This, I thought, takes away the whole redemption aspect of the movie, turning Andy into an innocent Mary Sue. I'd never considered that it may be more about Red's character instead. Though I didn't catch a satisfying explanation for that idea in the review, and it's been a long time since I watched the move.
I think I'll rewatch it today.
Andy has to be innocent for his escape (and bringing down of the warden) to be a redemption. It's a redemption of his life against the injustice he was subjected to, not a redemption of his soul for some evil that he committed.
If he was a double murderer, plotting to and successfully escaping isn't a redemption, it's just a murderer getting away with it.
I rewatched the movie now, and I think you're right. There were a lot of details I'd forgotten.
The way I remember thinking about it was that he was jailed for revenge murder, then spent his life in jail doing his best to atone by being helpful (building a library, teaching, helping with taxes, etc.). When the prison system refuses to set him free despite him proving through his actions in prison that he's not a threat to society anymore (I hallucinated this part -- this happened to Red, not Andy), he escapes, and his freedom is his redemption.
I'm not a native English speaker, and I think I may have conflated redemption and atonement. Looking at some definitions, it looks like you can receive redemption without atonement -- it doesn't necessarily have to come from within.
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Cool Hand Luke, which I prefer, has its protagonist sentenced to a work camp for an absurd crime.
A more recent prison movie which made me feel similarly to Cool Hand Luke and Shawshank Redemption while watching it is "I Love You Phillip Morris" (starring Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor).
Andy is by no means innocent, he’s just not guilty of any crime he should have been imprisoned in Shawshank for.
The guy who sits drunk in his car eyeing a revolver is not a Mary Sue. And his demeanor of resignation at Shawshank suggests he doesn’t consider himself just an unlucky victim of blind fate & a golf pro.
Yes, it was a bit too uncomplicated to me and smacks of "Oscar Bait."
It was my first movie about prison life in the US and the failures of the American justice and correctional system. I since learned it was realistic in every aspect apart from the escape, and that not much has changed since.
Everything about it is depressing and somehow it’s the best movie ever.
This generation will never experience the joy of flipping on network tv on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, seeing Shawshank on, sitting down and just watching it, even though you’ve seen it countless times and it’s the tv-edited commercial filled version.
I lived in Germany, and movies are dubbed there, so the TV stayed mostly off. I did turn on the TV once. There was a movie that looked half interesting, so I focused on it. The scene was two guys at the airport to pick up a girl who they had a crush on in highschool. They're waiting for her at the arrivals. "There she is!", cut to... not the girl walking in looking all glorius, but a beer ad. I turned it off and looked for the movie on Torrent.
[dead]
Coincidentally there is an interview with Roger Deakins, who did the cinematography on Shawshank, as well as many other excellent films, in The Guardian today.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/feb/08/roger-deakins-c...
A great complement to that article is the Team Deakins podcast, where Roger Deakins and James Deakins talk about cinematography, filmmaking and the business of film.
https://teamdeakins.libsyn.com/
Quite a few classics like this and "Office Space" were box office flops that were resurrected by the magic of VHS/DVD. Yet those are gone too. Is there any room left for the "sleeper hit" in 2026?
There's a pattern of movies flopping in theaters only to become top 10 on Netflix. It's very similar in many ways.
The difference is there was backend participation for VHS/DVD rentals... whereas Netflix is paying a one-time flat rate to acquire your flopped movie.
There's no space left for actual hits. Movies aren't even given proper theatrical releases. One week at the theater then straight to streaming, or even simultaneous theater and streaming releases.
Features are in decline and theater releases are doomed; they're in the agonal breathing stage already. But against that you have the rise of series, which arguably a better storytelling medium.
Are you implying that movie theaters are a better experience than home theaters? I'd argue movie theaters dug their own graves with greed shovels.
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K-pop demon hunters.
That's not a sleeper hit, it became the most watched animation ever on Netflix 1 month after the release and then the most watched film ever after 2 months.
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What about it
I feel that anyone that has ever suffered an injustice (and who hasn’t at some time or another) can relate to this film. And survivors of all kinds can understand what it means to “crawl through a river of shit” to earn their reprieve.
"Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" is one of my favourite Stephen King short stories (From "Different Seasons"). I actually read it after watching the film (which is just amazing) and still ended up liking the short story more than the film. I would highly recommend it to just about anyone.
"Stand by Me" was based on "The Body" from that same book. Great collection.
"Apt Pupil" was also adapted as a movie tho not as good as the other two, imvho.
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Roger Ebert was a national treasure. The saga of his review of director Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny" [1] always makes me laugh:
> American critic Roger Ebert has hit back at Vincent Gallo in the latest round of a public spat over whether the actor-director did or did not apologise for his derided Cannes contender The Brown Bunny. Earlier this week Gallo denied having apologised and claimed the critic was "a fat pig" for saying that he had. He added: "The only thing I'm sorry for is putting a curse of Roger Ebert's colon."
> Yesterday, in his column for the Chicago Sun Times, Ebert stuck to his guns - quoting the editor of trade magazine Screen International, who says that they have Gallo's apology on tape. On the question of his cursed colon, Ebert said: "I am not too worried. I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny."
> The critic rounded off his article (as it were) by casually conceding that he is overweight. "It is true that I am fat," Ebert wrote. "But one day I shall be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny."
Later on, Gallo went back to the editing room and cut a quarter of the film. Ebert re-watched it and actually ended up giving it a thumbs' up.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2003/jun/05/news2
Are there any new Eberts? The review landscape feels like it still hasn't exited his shadow but needs to evolve.
Mark Kermode is wonderful. Incredibly intelligent takes, thoughtful analysis, and brutal honesty when it's warranted. He's a delight to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/@kermodeandmayostake
You'll never know because there aren't that many good films to review.
As of when? It's not likely to be like the 70s again, but it wasn't for the majority of his career.
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Roger Ebert writing style was so polished. I wish I could write like this. My writing tends to be quite dry to the extent that GPTzero flagged it as written by AI. The reason given was "the lack of a creative use of grammar."
On a separate note, although vastly different, Fight Club was also not very successful on the box office (domestically made losses) but became a hit on DVDs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club)
(1999) (The movie is from 1994, the review is from 1999.)
In my opinion, the costs to make movies have gone down so much that you will find sincerity not only in high production value releases but also in YouTube and vlogs.
It’s not the cost of movies going down as budgets keep going up. It is the cost of consumer video equipment that has lowered the bar to entry for production. Video equipment never looked as good a film until digital sensors and high speed storage. Not having a delay of getting film exposed and being able to see playback immediately after stopping the camera also lowers expenses.
I recently saw it as a play in a theater, and although I had my reservations regarding this, the result was an interesting experience. The minimalist staging shifted the focus to the performances and the emotional weight of the story, highlighting the quiet persistence of hope.
The title of the play also differed from the movie, Rita Hayworth: Last Exit, which feels somewhat like a spoiler. I believe this was the title used by the Greek distributor.
It's a fine movie, agreed. The movie's focus isn't on revenge, but on the interaction between the protagonists. Anyways, the story outline heavily reminds me of the classic "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Dumas.
Disclaimer: I never read Stephen King's original short story, on which the movie is based, so I cannot say how this compares to Dumas' classic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo
There’s a scene in the movie directly acknowledging this when they are sorting the books for the expanded library. Heywood calls it the Count of Monte Crisco by Alexandree Dumbass and Andy says it’s about a prison break. Heywood then suggests it should go in the educational section.
Excellent, memorable scene.
But it is Red who suggests it should be filed under ‘education’!
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I miss reading Roger, reading his reviews and writing was one of my favorite things to do.
In 1995, our art teacher used a full week of class time to screen this for us, for no other reason than she felt it was an incredible film that deserved a wider audience. She was right.
Sometimes I think I'm the only person in the world who doesn't like this film.
You're not alone. I find it pretty dull, manipulative and schmaltzy.
This is the great thing about art, there's no objective measurement, people are free to disagree and like what they like.
You may very well be! Why?
Very strange that the cast list on this web page doesn't include Morgan Freeman.
this type of thing happens quite often. I can only guess that part of the page is automated or farmed out because I see it all the time, main actors not credited when the list is 4-6 people.
If you go to Ebert's wikipedia, you can almost miss the link to the screenplay he wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Valley_of_the_Dolls
This was co-produced with Russ Meyer, who basically made a bunch films which are as close to porn as you can get without being technically porn. He also made a ton of porn films as well. I haven't seen any of them, but many are now cult films. It feels debatable that he intended these to become cultural relics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Meyer
I was surprised to see Roger Ebert was involved in that film! Gene Siskel, his long time partner, rated Valley of the Dolls 0 out of 4 stars, which is funny.
What’s an equivalent movie in contemporary times? Not pretentious, sincere and relies on dialogue and story telling?
I kind of hated movies like Manchester By The Sea, American Sniper, Banshees of Insherin.
They all feel not so sincere to me. There’s something about them - a technique where audience exposition is deliberately toned down to such an extent that it’s just scene after scene with no soul.
“Sincere” and “authentic” are very much taste factors calibrated by whatever was the media environment when you were growing up.
Most people think the best year in pop music history was the one when they were 12. There’s a similar effect about the good old movies.
It is an objective fact though that the lack of DVD sales on the backend has completely changed the economics of movies and what gets made.
You also can't really compare the 90s to now when music and the movies were the dominate art form and there was no way to get rich and famous from just the internet.
I watched an interview with Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains and he said in the late 80s Seatle, he worked at a giant 50 room rehearsal space, almost apartment complex, that was opened 24/7. Music can't be the same as a time when being in a band was so popular that the economics could support a 50 band room rehearsal space that never closes. It is night and day different to now. Same with movies.
I was afraid I was committing the same mistake. Am I just used to the older type of movies? It could be possible.
Watch japanese films. Or just generally don't watch american films
Kore-eda Hirokazu: Still Walking (2008), Monster (2023), Shoplifters (2018)
Hamaguchi Ryusuke: Drive My Car (2021), Evil Does Not Exist (2023)
A Story of Yonosuke (2013) from Okita Shuichi
Memories of Matsuko (2006) from Nakashima Tetsuya
Departures (2008) from Takita Yojiro
Perfect Days (2023) from Wim Wenders. Even though he is not japanese it's a very japanese film
but there are lot more
I second the Kore-eda rec although it's an acquired taste, not so easy as Shawshank. Shoplifters was a revelation.
Japanese films are notoriously bad. You found a few gems. They are rare. This topic comes up often in Japanese learning groups.
There's also just personal takes. I had to shut off Memories of Matsuko. Maybe the end saves it but it was way too over the top and not in a good way.
Some good older Japanese though
Kurasawa: Ikiru (1955)
Teshigahara: Woman in the Dunes (1964)
These are 2 movies you won't forget.
Conversely, even though I enjoyed Shoplifters I remember nothing about it except the guy celebrating he had sex and the girl burping. Similarly with After Life. I just watched it 2 months ago and had to go look it up to remember what it was about. It was interesting because of the premise but not because of the movie itself.
You can't mention Kore-eda without mentioning After Life (1998), surely? (Confusingly called Wonderful Life in Japanese, and also I don't mean the Gervais series.)
There's a recent US "remake"/homage which I haven't dared to watch.
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You're looking for story-driven movies and setting the bar at Shawshank, which is IMDB's all-time most popular movie, so that's kind of a tall order.
You're also rattling off three movies that have almost nothing to do with each other. Banshees of Inisherin in particular isn't a crowd-pleasing movie. To stick with Martin McDonagh, check out In Bruges or Three Billboards. I didn't like American Sniper either (it's Temu Hurt Locker), but sticking with Clint Eastwood, check out Gran Torino.
I rave about "The Secret Agent" (2025) to everyone. It's a slice of life movie about people living under a dictatorship. It's got a lot of heart.
A good, meditative film with a long arc of time and a bit of prison is Ash is the Purest White (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7298400/)
Jagten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt_(2012_film)
Yes I have watched it and it’s a good match
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Parasite was excellent, and even has some of the same themes if you squint hard enough.
Banshees of Insherin is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. The understatedness is critical to the humor and story; it’s a juxtaposition of boring people in a boring town and the batshit plots that develop.
Other recent greats are maybe Poor Things, Challengers, and Conclave.
You wouldn’t mistake any for Shawshank, but that’s ok, it’s 30 years later. Shawshank is also qualitatively different from great movies in the mid 1960’s, like Dr. Strangelove or The Graduate.
Who is the new Stephen King? I suppose answering my question will automatically also give an answer to yours.
I think this opens a huge can of further questions: what is a Stephen King? Is it a best selling author who's a house name, a very successful genre author, one who spans genres and is successful in all of them, one whose' books get regularly translated to TV, a very good craftman of books that people actually read...
My feeling is that there isn't and _won't be_ a new Stephen King that checks all the boxes, due to declining readership and reduced barriers to independent publishing.
I wouldn’t exclude TV shows: Halt and Catch Fire, Dark Matter, Ted Lasso.
Ted Lasso comes off as so smarmy that it's insincere to me, like a cynical attempt to ride a wave of New Sincerity.
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Andor
About Dry Grasses by Nuri Ceylan. Probably the best film I’ve seen in the past 10 years, which isn’t saying that much because the past 10 years have been among the worst in the history of film, but it’s still a very good movie.
> It is a strange comment to make about a film set inside a prison, but “The Shawshank Redemption” creates a warm hold on our feelings because it makes us a member of a family. Many movies offer us vicarious experiences and quick, superficial emotions. “Shawshank” slows down and looks. It uses the narrator’s calm, observant voice to include us in the story of men who have formed a community behind bars. It is deeper than most films; about continuity in a lifetime, based on friendship and hope.
I think Ebert is a brilliant reviewer; here I think something is overlooked: I agree about the emotional tone but not about the effect or the truth behind it. The prison is a fearful, traumatic place, of rape you can't stop, where life hangs by a thread, you take risks (for example with the bookkeeping) living on a razor's edge. The constant danger hangs over everything - you might not survive the day, you might be assaulted again, today might be the day they look more closely at what you're doing and you're caught.
That belies the calm narration and friendship. They provide an island of hope and love amid the trauma, in stark contrast to it, in constant tension with it.
You might say the narration is a device to make it palatable to middle-class audiences. That's something I notice a lot in Hollywood. First, the protagonist is someone they can identify with - a banker, a middle-class job - wrongly convicted, in this horrible situation. They are not, for example, a homeless person or someone semi-employed doing manual labor (someone much more likely to be wrongly convicted) - that would be a different movie and much less empathetic for many viewers, though objectively exactly as horrible. Then you have this calm, warm, reasonable voice telling the story - not a voice of terror or hate or trauma; that would be too much; the voice says 'it's ok'.
As Ebert says,
> The movie avoids lingering on Andy’s suffering; after beatings, he’s seen in medium and long shot, tactfully. The camera doesn’t focus on Andy’s wounds or bruises, but, like his fellow prisoners, gives him his space.
And I think also the following claim goes much too far:
> His film grants itself a leisure that most films are afraid to risk. The movie is as deliberate, considered and thoughtful as Freeman’s narration. There’s a feeling in Hollywood that audiences have short attention spans and must be assaulted with fresh novelties.
Sure, it's not the Avengers but it's a movie where the main plot elements are prison violence, a prison escape, and a grand con. This isn't Tokyo Story or In the Mood for Love.
> First, the protagonist is someone they can identify with - a banker, a middle-class job - wrongly convicted, in this horrible situation.
You're right that the protagonist is wrongly convicted, but the narrator of the movie was guilty of murder.