Guest-programmed by Alvin Cobb Jr.
“To fight the walls, to fight myself, to fight the door. You too, Mr. Blanchet, should fight and hope." — Lieutenant Fontaine, A Man Escaped (1956)
A high-stakes subgenre centered around meticulous preparation and courageous execution, the prison escape film taps into themes of resilience, freedom, and the triumph of the spirit against insurmountable odds. Whether it’s Paul Newman’s timeless character study in COOL HAND LUKE, the comedic genius of Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in Sidney Poitier’s STIR CRAZY, the Coen Brothers’ American roots music-filled O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? – all these films bring us somewhere close to hope in the face of the brutality and hypocrisy of an unjust legal system.
Coming up in this Series
Black Mama White Mama
Opens April 24
Lee Daniels (Pam Grier) is a black girl busted for prostitution. Karen Brent (Margaret Markov) is a white girl arrested for her involvement with a loc... Read more
Cool Hand Luke
Opens April 11
When petty criminal Luke Jackson (Paul Newman) is sentenced to two years in a Florida prison farm, he doesn’t play by the rules of either the sadistic... Read more
Escape From Alcatraz
Opens April 28
Frank Morris (Clint Eastwood), a hardened con with a history of prison breaks, is sent to serve the rest of his life sentence at Alcatraz -- America's... Read more
Escape from New York
Opens April 10
When the President crash lands on the island of Manhattan, now a maximum security prison, Snake Plissken is sent in to rescue him...or die trying. Joh... Read more
Holes
Opens April 19
A wrongfully convicted boy is sent to a brutal desert detention camp where he joins the job of digging holes for some mysterious reason.
A Man Escaped
Opens April 24
With the simplest of concepts and sparest of techniques, Robert Bresson made one of the most suspenseful jailbreak films of all time in A Man Escaped.... Read more
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Opens April 9
Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) is having difficulty adjusting to his hard-labor sentence in Mississippi. He scams his way off the chain gang... Read more
Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky
Opens April 17
The greatest gore-soaked Hong Kong prison breakout love story of 1991—and STILL the Category III (HK’s equivalent to “NC-17”) mug melter that tops all... Read more
Stir Crazy
Opens April 12
With a jailbreak offering them their only way out, a despondent duo rack their brains to figure out a foolproof plan. Fortuitously, one of them discov... Read more