Alcatraz, 1938; after 3 years in solitary, a hellish hole in the ground with no heat, light or human contact, petty crook Henri Young emerges as a madman. When he kills another inmate there is only one man - attorney James Stamphill - willing to challenge the barbarity of Alcatraz. Moving and riveting with great performances from all three leads. find out more...

The tale of two men banged up for years in the notorious French penal colony Devil's Island. Two escape bids by one of them results in years of solitary confinement but make him simply more determined to flee, even as old age approachs. The ultimate prison escape movie loosely based on a true story. find out more...

The tale of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's last official executioner, a man who personally dispatched 608 men and women, including various Nazi war criminals, Timothy Evans and Ruth Ellis. Timothy Spall superbly pulls off how this rather ordinary, but distinctly odd, bloke coped emotionally and professionally with his job. An awesome period piece and a superb look into a very strange occupation. A must for anyone who liked Vera Drake. find out more...

Australia's dark secret of institutionalist eugenics gets an impressive and heartfelt celluloid airing in this adaptation of Doris Pilkington Garimara's book, a story based around the astonishing real life journey of three young girls, removed from their true Aboriginal families and transplanted to a boarding school/prison to be trained as domestic servants (from whence it was hoped they would quietly blend into white society), and their 1,500 mile trek home with only a rabbit proof fence to gui find out more...

An epic family drama spanning three generations of a Jewish family, who moved from a rural village to the city, became wealthy, respected, bourgeois and/or radicalised and Hungarianised, set against a backdrop of the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, World War 1, the rise of fascism, the Holocaust and the Communist era. A tour-de-force performance by Ralph Fiennes in various reincarnations, especially as the character who won a fencing gold medal for Hungary in the 1936 Olympics, in th find out more...

It's 1942 and eight-year-old Bruno knows nothing of Germany's Final Solution and the Holocaust, only that his father was promoted and he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area. Here there is nothing to do and no one to play with, that is until he meets Shmuel, a boy who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of a wire fence, and who, like the other people there, wears a uniform of striped pyjamas. Bruno's friendship with Shmuel takes him from find out more...

Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch is the king of counterfeiters and lives a sweet life of cards, booze and women. Eventually Salomon's luck runs out when he's arrested and thrown into a Nazi concentration camp, but it's not long before his exceptional skills are spotted and he is coerced into a counterfeit operation on a gargantuan scale; a plan to help finance the war effort and flood the British and American economies with fake currency. For the first time in his life Salomon finds himself in a mo find out more...

From the director of 'Shawshank Redemption' and based on another story by Stephen King, the title refers to the last walk condemned prisoners make to the electric chair. 'The Green Mile' is filled with the mystical, one of the prisoners having the power to heal and emanating a goodness which slowly but surely disperses the weary cynicism of the guards. Though the story itself is relatively slight it's the ensemble acting which makes 'The Green Mile' such a strong, watchable movie, Tom Hanks in p find out more...

Varanasi, India, 1938; 7-year-old Chuyia's husband has died and she is forced to live as a virtual prisoner, as a future cash cow for the mainly elderly inhabitats, in a widows' ashram. Her main ally, beautiful and still young Kalyani, is flirting with handsome Brahmin's son, and Mahatma Gandhi follower, Narayan, but marriage for a widow is against the arcane laws of the Hindu religion. Plausible but with an uncomfortable mixture of Bollywood melodrama and social realism. find out more...