Get busy living or get busy dying

Rating: 10/10 (18 August 2015)

The fact this movie stands at the IMDb top for years now should be enough to convince you to watch this asap. Based on a novella by Stephen King, Frank Darabont's film is perhaps the most accomplished prison drama ever. If you liked Papillon, you are going to love Shawshank's Redemption. But this is more than just a bleak prison drama. Not that there aren't grim situations depicted here. Several points in the story are not for the faint of heart for their cruelty and outright sense of injustice. The ordeals of one Andy Dufresne (in an unsurpassed performance by Tim Robbins) and his fellow cell mates are in fact so harrowing that will make you beg for justice to be done and pray for salvation. Is there hope and light at the end of the tunnel? Let's say that this movie belongs to that group of films (like Sixth Sense and Jacob's Ladder) that have a little secret and when the time for catharsis comes, after all the trials our hero has been through, it doesn't just rain, it pours. It is that precise moment that turns what would have otherwise been a finely crafted drama into a timeless classic. As the protagonist at one point says, hope is a good thing, perhaps the best of things. And it is hope that fuels this expertly told tale of fight against adversity and why this film resonates so strongly with so many people.