Best Prison Movies of All Time: 11 Films About Doing Time

Frank Darabont turned a Stephen King novella into the most loved film of its kind, and the reason is patience. It gives Andy Dufresne twenty years and lets you feel every one of them, so the payoff is earned rather than staged.

Morgan Freeman narrates it as memory, which is why it plays like something you were told rather than something you watched. If you have only seen it once, on television, watch it properly. It is a different film without the ad breaks.

Paul Newman refuses to break, and the whole film is the prison discovering it cannot make him. The eggs, the road gang, the line about a failure to communicate, all of it has been quoted to death, and none of it has worn out.

This is the film Shawshank is quietly arguing with. Luke will not be rehabilitated because he will not be anything they name.

Robert Bresson made the purest escape film ever shot, based on a real French Resistance prisoner, and he stripped out everything that was not a hand, a spoon, a door, a sound. There is no suspense music and no heroics, only work.

If you think you have seen every escape movie, you have seen the ones this made possible.

Jacques Becker's last film, made with a cast including a man who had actually attempted the escape it depicts. The famous shot of the prisoners breaking through the floor plays in real time, and it is unbearable.

The deep cut on this list. Anyone who names it has done the reading.

Jacques Audiard follows an illiterate nineteen year old into a French prison and out the other side as something else entirely. It is a crime epic that happens to be set inside, and Tahar Rahim's performance is one of the great debuts.

Where Shawshank is about keeping your soul, this is about trading it up.

Steve McQueen's first feature, about the 1981 hunger strike in the Maze, built around a seventeen minute conversation shot in one take. Michael Fassbender is terrifying in it.

Not an easy watch and not meant to be. It is the film on this list that comes closest to being a physical experience.

Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood, working almost silently, turn the most famous prison in America into a procedural. No speeches, no swelling music, just a man measuring a wall.

It is the American answer to Bresson, and it holds up better than most of what came after it.

Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman in the penal colony, and the film that best captures how long a sentence actually feels. The solitary confinement stretch is the part people remember years later, and rightly.

Watch it for McQueen's face after two years in the dark. Nothing in the script does as much work.

The crowd pleaser, and still a marvel of construction. John Sturges keeps three tunnels, a dozen characters and a motorcycle in the air at once and never loses you.

It earns its place because it understands that the escape is not the point. The organising is the point.

Billy Wilder's prisoner of war film is funny right up until it is not, and William Holden won an Oscar for playing a man nobody in the barracks trusts.

The deep cut for people who think they do not like old Hollywood. It is sourer and smarter than its reputation.

Alan Parker and a young Oliver Stone script, based on Billy Hayes in a Turkish prison. It is lurid and it has been fairly criticised for what it does with its setting, but as a portrait of panic it is hard to shake.

Included because it belongs to the conversation, and because Stone's fingerprints on it explain a lot about Platoon.