IndieWire's 25 Essential Prison Movies

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The Playlist Staff
Jul 23, 2015 2:03 pm

Kyle Patrick Alvarez‘s “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” now playing in limited release, took fourteen years to get made, and finally arrived at Sundance 2015 with a stellar ensemble including Billy Crudup, Ezra Miller, Olivia Thirlby, Tye Sheridan and Michael Angarano. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the uncompromising nature of the film, the reception was divided (our own rave is here) but even those on the more negative end of the spectrum tended to use words like “compelling,” “vivid” and “effective” in their critiques. And those are adjectives that this film (which scooped the Screenwriting award for Tim Talbott) shares with the best in the wide and variegated genre of the prison movie.

The microcosmic possibilities of life on the inside have been mined many times for dramas, comedies, spoofs and thrillers that, while set in penal institutions or situations that resemble them, actually comment on human psychology or on the society outside those walls. And we got to thinking about our own favorite prison movies through the ages. Here are 25 we’d consider a great primer in the genre.

Honorable Mentions
If you’ve seen all the above, you’re a) really into prison movies and b) probably hankering for more, so here’s another few titles we debated including (out of the many hundreds of films that qualify): The Green Mile, The Cube, Caged, Caged Heat, Stir Crazy, The Longest Yard, Carandiru, Scum, The Escapist, Escape to Victory, The Rock, Death Row, Into the Abyss, The Life and Mind of Mark deFriest, Tattooed Tears

–Jessica Kiang, Erik McClanahan, Oliver Lyttelton, Rodrigo Perez

Notes:
- List does not appear to be ranked.
- I removed most of the HM text and just included the mentioned films.

See also: IndieWire's Our 15 Favorite Prison Breaks at the Movies