The Shawshank Redemption

The Shawshank Redemption (1994) failed in cinemas, spread on video rental, and has sat at the top of IMDb for thirty years. That strange route says something about the film itself. Andy Dufresne is given life for killing his wife and her lover. At Shawshank he carves out a position using his accounting skills and becomes friends with Red. That friendship is what the film is built on. The subject is not escape, it is time. Twenty years actually feel like twenty years here, and getting that right is what separates it from most prison films. It shows how one man wears down across the decades and how another does not. Morgan Freeman's narration is treated as a cliché now, but it does real work: because Red is telling it, we never see Andy from the inside. That is deliberate. It comes from a Stephen King novella. King sold the rights to Darabont for a thousand dollars and never cashed the cheque. Good for: drama, prison films, and stories about friendship holding across years. Less good for: there is a rape scene and serious violence. It is also not fast. 142 minutes, slow on purpose.