The Shawshank Redemption

The Shawshank Redemption (1994) is an impressive, engrossing piece of film-making from first-time director/screenwriter Frank Darabont who adapted horror master Stephen King's 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (first published in Different Seasons). The inspirational, life-affirming and uplifting, old-fashioned style Hollywood product (resembling The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and Cool Hand Luke (1967)) is a combination prison/dramatic film and character study, abetted by the golden cinematography of Roger Deakins, a touching score by Thomas Newman, and …

…my fellow convicts, and neither can Dufresne, so to anyone who has never wielded a lead-weighted pool cue in anger he assumes the guise of a kindred spirit. The result is a character who personifies our fear of being consigned to a ten-foot cell, alone with our fears and memories of happier times, left with nothing, as Red puts it, but "all the time in the world to think about it". It is this identificat