Prison movies are always good. You always have a group of men (usually men) who are locked up, an authority they hate, and someone with a plan to get out. Either they are being punished for something they didn’t do, they transform behind bars, or they escape in a brilliant fashion. It is a formula that has worked for as long as films have existed. Here are the ten best.
10. American History X (1998)
Edward Norton plays Derek Vineyard, a neo-Nazi who goes to prison after killing two Black men who tried to steal his truck. While inside, he is assaulted by his own Aryan Brotherhood because he strikes up a friendship with a Black inmate (Guy Torry).
Norton emerges as a changed man and tries to save his younger brother (Edward Furlong) before he follows the same path. The curb scene is one of the most brutal things you will ever see in a film.
9. Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Paul Newman is Luke Jackson, who goes to prison for cutting the heads off parking meters while drunk. He ends up in a Southern chain gang where he refuses to bow to authority. He keeps escaping, they keep recapturing him, and he keeps trying. George Kennedy won an Oscar as Dragline, the prisoner who becomes Luke’s friend.
The famous quote “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate” comes from this film.
8. A Prophet (Un Prophète) (2009)
Jacques Audiard made a French prison film about Malik (Tahar Rahim), a 19-year-old Arab man sentenced to six years for attacking police. He can barely read or write but learns to survive by aligning himself with the Corsican mafia inside the prison. He is forced to murder a fellow inmate and evolves into a criminal mastermind. The film lasts 2.5 hours, and every minute is filled with tension.
7. Escape from Alcatraz (1979)
Clint Eastwood is Frank Morris, who is sent to Alcatraz because he has escaped from other prisons too many times. Alcatraz is the place you go when nowhere else can hold you—it sits on an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay surrounded by freezing water. Morris plans an escape using spoons, raincoats, and papier-mâché heads. In 1962, they actually escaped, and to this day, no one knows if they survived.
6. The Great Escape (1963)
A World War II prisoner-of-war camp full of Allied soldiers who keep escaping. The Nazis put them all in one camp, thinking the problem is solved, but that only makes it worse—now all the escape experts are together.
Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, and Charles Bronson plan a mass escape of 250 men via a tunnel. Based on a true story, though McQueen’s motorcycle chase is a Hollywood addition.
5. In the Name of the Father (1993)
Daniel Day-Lewis plays Gerry Conlon, a petty criminal from Belfast who is in London during the IRA pub bombings in 1974. The British police torture him until he confesses and throw him in prison with his father (Pete Postlethwaite). They are locked up for 15 years for something they didn’t do. Emma Thompson plays their lawyer who fights to set them free. It is based on a true story, and Day-Lewis is staggering.
4. Papillon (1973)
Steve McQueen is Henri ‘Papillon’ Charrière, convicted of a murder he didn’t commit and sent to a French penal colony in South America. Dustin Hoffman is Louis Dega, a forger who finances Papillon’s escape attempts in exchange for protection.
The film shows his escape attempts over many years—the diseases, the solitary confinement, and the madness. McQueen eventually jumps off a cliff into the ocean using a bag of coconuts as a raft.
3. Hunger (2008)
Steve McQueen (the director, not the actor) made his debut with this film about the 1981 IRA hunger strike in the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. Michael Fassbender plays Bobby Sands, the IRA member who refuses to wear prison clothes and begins a hunger strike that lasts 66 days.
The film depicts the horrific conditions—prisoners smearing their own excrement on the walls and refusing to wash. There is a 17-minute uninterrupted dialogue scene between Sands and a priest. Fassbender lost 16 kilos for the role.
2. Le Trou (The Hole) (1960)
The final film by Jacques Becker. Four prisoners in a Parisian jail are working on an escape plan through the sewers. Then a fifth man is moved into their cell. Do they trust him? Do they tell him the plan? The film shows men digging a hole in the floor, breaking through lock after lock, and crawling through tunnels.
It might sound simple, but it is the most tense film on this list. It is based on a true story—one of the real escapees advised Becker during filming.
1. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Frank Darabont adapted Stephen King’s novella. Tim Robbins is Andy Dufresne, a banker convicted of murdering his wife and her lover—which he didn’t do. Morgan Freeman is Red, the inmate who can “get things.” Andy spends 19 years digging a tunnel through his cell wall with a small rock hammer while pretending to just do his time.
The film flopped at the box office but became the number 1 movie on IMDb through video rentals and television reruns.
