Sublimely powerful.

Rating: Null/10 (4 February 2003)

It deserves ten stars. Its beauty lies in its slow pace and genteel wit, although some may not have the patience for the slowness. But the whole premise of life inside a prison cell makes better sense when told in a calm, emotion-building, pace such as this. Otherwise, one would never get to know Tim Robbins's quiet accountant (and what makes him appear alternately shy, snobbish, and suicidal all at the same time); or Morgan Freeman's genial-but-cynical lifer- not to mention how he's "a man who knows how to get things." I love what the film doesn't do: it doesn't make an issue of its two leads being different races (although one could claim that makes their friendship all the more marvelous), it doesn't pull any sensational, far-out, action punches (as films with an all-male cast often do), and it doesn't freeze its characters into types. Everyone is real and everyone is flawed- from James Whitmore's bird loving veteran to Bob Gunton's pretentious, icy, warden. But the finish (which really starts around the film's last twenty minutes) is one of the most powerful and moving things ever committed to film. Get it in either format.