One of best films ever made

Rating: Null/10 (27 August 1999)

Stephen King's original story 'Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption' has long been one of my favourites, and when I heard it was getting the Hollywood treatment I was suspicious (after all, Stephen King's Hollywood track record isn't exactly outstanding). Then I heard Morgan Freeman was involved, and thought, 'Sounds good!' I was living in England when the film was released, so had to wait until several weeks after the U.S. opening before I saw it. I took my husband along with me: he's not a huge King fan, and I think that the prospect of a two-hour-plus prison film based on a Stephen King story wasn't hugely appealing: but we both came out realising we had seen a truly great film. Strangely, British movie critics (on the whole) gave the film a much better reception than did the American ones, and right from the start SHAWSHANK has been more highly thought of there: the British film magazine EMPIRE has recognised its quality from the start, and in its recent tenth anniversary issue picked it as one of the ten best films of the 1990s (with detailed reasons). To me it's one of the ten best films I've ever seen: it's one that repays multiple viewings, and the two central performances are outstanding. I'm now eagerly awaiting the film's DVD release.