Latest news with #TheBridgeontheRiverKwai
Yahoo
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The 13 Most Captivating Prison Movies We've Ever Seen
These prison movies are captivating. Get it? Some of the best movies are actually movies about life on the outside, where the prison represents the mental traps imposed on us by society, or our own fears. Other prison movies are about very real prisons, built for the deserving and innocent alike. Related Headlines The 13 Best SNL Sketches in 50 Years of Saturday Night Live The 12 Strangest Movies We've Ever Seen Why We Spent Our Wedding Fund Making Our Horror Movie, Sight Unseen Here are 13 you'll find hard to escape. An early entry in the subgenre of women behind bars prison movies, John Cromwell's Caged is about a married 19-year-old (Eleanor Parker) who is locked up after a botched bank robbery in which her husband is killed. Hope Emerson plays sadistic prison maven, Evelyn Harper, in a story that reveals that prison may be the most corrupting influence of all. The film was nominated for three Oscars. Is it a prison movie? Or a war movie? We would say it's both — David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai is a movie that never does what you expect. Set in a Japanese prison camp in Thailand, the film portrays a battle of wills between captured British P.O.W. Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guiness) and his captor, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa). Saito demands that Nicholson and his troops build a railroad bridge over the River Kwai, which leads to questions of ethics and honor, and how to maintain your humanity while in captivity. It was the most successful movie at the box office in 1957, and deservedly won seven Oscars, including for Best Picture. It's one of those 1950s movies that is both a classic and a joy to watch. One of the greatest prison movies, this Clint Eastwood film was the star's fifth and final collaboration with Dirty Harry director Don Siegel. In fascinating detail, it imagines the circumstances of a real-life escape from the supposedly escape-proof Alcatraz Island in 1962. Eastwood plays the real-life prisoner Frank Morris, whose whereabouts have been unknown since that chilly night in the early '60s. He'll turn 98 this year, if he's still around. The FBI's investigation into the escape remains open. You knew this was coming, so we're putting it in this gallery nice and early. One of the most beloved films of recent decades, and pulled from the same Stephen King story collection, Different Seasons, that also spawned Stand by Me and Apt Pupil, The Shawshank Redemption is a story of refusing to surrender your soul. Tim Robbins stars as Andy Dufresne, a banker sentenced to consecutive life sentences in the killings of his wife and her lover. He befriends Ellis "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman) — and hatches a plot to dig his way out, while hiding the hole in his cell wall behind a poster of Rita Hayworth. It's one of the best prison movies and one of the best movies, period — IMDb ranks it No. 1 on its list of the Top 250 Movies of all. Paul Newman is transfixing as the title character, a man of few words (and hardboiled egg gourmand) who refuses to bend to the cruelty of his Florida prison camp. Strother Martin, as the captain of the camp, earned a place on the American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes for this monologue that begins, "What we've got here is failure to communicate." Guns N Roses fans will also recognize it from the opening of the band's "Civil War." The third film in a series of hit independent prison movies written and directed by Jamaa Fanaka, Penitentiary III is extremely worth watching for the Midnight Thud fight alone. Oh, you don't know about the Midnight Thud? Thud is the toughest fighter in the prison, a powerful little person (played by Raymond Kessler, aka the WWE's Haiti Kid) who delivers one of the most captivating fight scenes ever committed to film when he faces off with our protagonist, Too Sweet (Leon Isaac Kennedy). Also, this is the first of two films on this list to feature the great Danny Trejo. He plays See Veer. Trejo is one of the murderer's row of stars who turns up in Con Air, a prison-on-a-plane movie in which Cameron Poe (played by Nicolas Cage, looking incredibly cool) takes on a whole plane full of felons when its Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom masterminds a hijacking. This is one of those movies that — if you haven't watched it in a while — will have constantly saying, "He's in this, too?" The cast includes John Cusack, Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames, Dave Chappelle, and many, many more. Some people argue that this doesn't belong on a list of prison movies because the characters are on a plane. But as anyone who's ever flown a middle seat in basic economy can attest, planes can be prisons. Steve McQueen leads an all-star cast playing POWs who heroically escape from a Nazi prison camp in this classic, heavily fictionalized story of British POWs' escape from Stalag Luft III during World War II. Among the concessions to commercialism: sprinkling three Americans into the action. Thanks goodness McQueen's Captain Virgil Hilts was there, or else who could have pulled off that spectacular motorcycle sequence (above)? And now, a prison movie from the other Steve McQueen — the masterful British director whose film 12 Years a Slave won the Best Picture Oscar in 2014. His directorial debut, however, was Hunger, in which his frequent collaborator, Michael Fassbender, plays Bobby Sands, a real-life member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who led an IRA hunger strike and took part in a no-wash protest behind bars. Hunger is a brutal, hypnotic film that skillfully captures the day-to-day dehumanization of the prisoners. Another grim prison saga that was also the directorial debut of a great filmmaker, Clemency stars Alfre Woodard as a prison ward trying to unemotionally do her job — which includes overseeing the death of a young inmate, Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge) who maintains his innocence. Many death-penalty films lecture their audiences (who may have already opposed the death penalty), but Clemency writer-director Chinonye Chukwu does not: She just lays out the facts of the situation, with as much restraint as Woodard's warden — until emotions eventually make their inevitable break. This is a wise, patient film that sidesteps preaching and Hollywood hokum in favor of a very chilling, very human story. On the lighter side, The Longest Yard is a sports movie crossed with a prison movie... and a comedy. The film stars Burt Reynolds as a hard-driving, hard-hitting now-incarcerated former NFL quarterback who is tasked by a nasty warden with assembling a team of prisoners to play against the guards. How do you think that works out? Edward Norton stars as a savage white supremacist, Derek Vinyard, who realizes in prison that all of his beliefs are misguided. 'In one deeply allegorical scene, he learns that a Black fellow inmate, Lamont (Guy Torry) received a harsher sentence (six years) for stealing a TV than he received for killing two Black men (three years). In another crucial scene, he learns that the prisons Aryan Brotherhood is just using white supremacy as a facade to manipulate hopeless, uneducated people and wrest power for its leaders. A very different look at prison life, released in the same year as The Longest Yard. We aren't going to claim this low-budget Roger Corman production, also known as Renegade Girls, is a great film. But it is the debut of a very great filmmaker: writer-director Jonathan Demme would go on to make Silence of the Lambs, one of the best films of all time, and to repay Corman for his confidence by casting him in the role of FBI Director Hayden Burke. Silence of the Lambs was also shot but Demme's go-to cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto, who also shot Caged Heat. Caged Heat is a cheap exploitation flick, sure, but it contains some Demme hallmarks: strong female protagonists, a strong sense of empathy for the characters, and social consciousness. A 1975 New York Times story on the rise of "trashy" midnight movies concluded that it "does not set new standards of cheapness, violence or grossness, as most midnight movies seem determined to do. It is a film about women in prison that offers little more than some zippy music, a lot of bosom shots and a perverted prison doctor." High praise from the paper of record. Maybe the best example of the women-in-prison subgenre, The Big Bird Cage is a follow-up, but not a sequel, to 1971's The Big Doll House. It's most notable for a cast that includes the great Pam Grier, as well as horror icon Sid Haig as a radical named Django. Both Grier and Haig also starred in The Big Doll House, though they played different characters. Shot in the U.S. and the Philippines, The Big Bird Cage documents the liberation of a prison camp where women are kept barefoot and scantily clad as they're subjected to hard labor. Even without ever hearing him talk about it, we're confident Quentin Tarantino has some big opinions on this one. Like Caged Heat, it came from the wonderful Roger Corman's New World Pictures, because of course it did. You may also like this list of the 15 Movie Con Artists We Fall for Every Time. Some of them end up in prison. You might also like this list of Gen X Movie Stars Gone Too Soon. Main image: A promotional image from The Big Bird Cage. New World Pictures. Related Headlines The 13 Best SNL Sketches in 50 Years of Saturday Night Live The 12 Strangest Movies We've Ever Seen Why We Spent Our Wedding Fund Making Our Horror Movie, Sight Unseen
Sydney Morning Herald
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
I went to visit a famous bridge - and it wasn't there
Riding on the Death Railway is an incongruously jaunty experience, like a trip on Puffing Billy. We trundle past mountains, fields, coconut palms and jungle, all a brilliant green. The locals sell food and the tourists chat cheerfully. It takes a huge feat of imagination to picture what it was like to be one of the poor PoWs or Asian labourers who were forced to put down these tracks for the Japanese. There are tributes to these men, of course. I visited a well-tended Thai cemetery in Kanchanaburi and a modest museum with a replica of the bamboo huts where they lived. It displays some horrifying photographs and paintings of skeletal and sore-ridden bodies. When the train gets to the bridge, the tourists are puzzled. Where is it, they want to know. Where is the wooden bridge on the River Kwai, so famously portrayed in the classic 1957 film? There's a bridge here all right, but it's made of concrete and steel. It turns out the wooden bridge never existed, except as a film prop. As our Thai guide explains, The Bridge on the River Kwai is a made-up story. The film is based on a 1952 novel of the same name by a Frenchman, Pierre Boulle. He was a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II but he never worked on their hellish Burma-Siam railway. It's a story of heroism and craziness. The British commander of the captured men, Colonel Nicholson (portrayed memorably by Alec Guinness in the film), is a super-stubborn hero determined to show the Japanese a thing or two by building them the best bridge British engineering skills and labour can create. He becomes a little too attached to his creation. Boulle based his character on his experience with collaborating French officers. In reality, PoWs did build a bridge under horrendous conditions, and they showed a different kind of heroism: they were determined to sabotage the construction in whatever way they could, risking the wrath of their captors. The bridge was bombed by the Allies and restored after the war. There are many books, both histories and fictions, about the notorious construction of the Burma-Siam railway, which involved about 13,000 Australians. One outstanding novel is Richard Flanagan's Booker-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North, inspired by his father's ordeal (now adapted as an Amazon Prime miniseries). Another fine Australian novel set in part on the railway is David Malouf's 1990 Miles Franklin winner, The Great World. Our guide wanted to tell us about another film which he said was much accurate than The Bridge on the River Kwai. His pick was the 2013 film The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, which was based on a 1995 autobiography by Eric Lomax, a British Army officer who underwent brutal tortures when working on the railway. The experience left him with mental scars and a desire for revenge, but the story also asks about the possibility of forgiveness for your tormentors.
The Age
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
I went to visit a famous bridge - and it wasn't there
Riding on the Death Railway is an incongruously jaunty experience, like a trip on Puffing Billy. We trundle past mountains, fields, coconut palms and jungle, all a brilliant green. The locals sell food and the tourists chat cheerfully. It takes a huge feat of imagination to picture what it was like to be one of the poor PoWs or Asian labourers who were forced to put down these tracks for the Japanese. There are tributes to these men, of course. I visited a well-tended Thai cemetery in Kanchanaburi and a modest museum with a replica of the bamboo huts where they lived. It displays some horrifying photographs and paintings of skeletal and sore-ridden bodies. When the train gets to the bridge, the tourists are puzzled. Where is it, they want to know. Where is the wooden bridge on the River Kwai, so famously portrayed in the classic 1957 film? There's a bridge here all right, but it's made of concrete and steel. It turns out the wooden bridge never existed, except as a film prop. As our Thai guide explains, The Bridge on the River Kwai is a made-up story. The film is based on a 1952 novel of the same name by a Frenchman, Pierre Boulle. He was a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II but he never worked on their hellish Burma-Siam railway. It's a story of heroism and craziness. The British commander of the captured men, Colonel Nicholson (portrayed memorably by Alec Guinness in the film), is a super-stubborn hero determined to show the Japanese a thing or two by building them the best bridge British engineering skills and labour can create. He becomes a little too attached to his creation. Boulle based his character on his experience with collaborating French officers. In reality, PoWs did build a bridge under horrendous conditions, and they showed a different kind of heroism: they were determined to sabotage the construction in whatever way they could, risking the wrath of their captors. The bridge was bombed by the Allies and restored after the war. There are many books, both histories and fictions, about the notorious construction of the Burma-Siam railway, which involved about 13,000 Australians. One outstanding novel is Richard Flanagan's Booker-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North, inspired by his father's ordeal (now adapted as an Amazon Prime miniseries). Another fine Australian novel set in part on the railway is David Malouf's 1990 Miles Franklin winner, The Great World. Our guide wanted to tell us about another film which he said was much accurate than The Bridge on the River Kwai. His pick was the 2013 film The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, which was based on a 1995 autobiography by Eric Lomax, a British Army officer who underwent brutal tortures when working on the railway. The experience left him with mental scars and a desire for revenge, but the story also asks about the possibility of forgiveness for your tormentors.
Irish Independent
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
What to watch on TV and streaming today: Super Garden, Wear Whatever The F You Want and Racing from Punchestown
Racing from Punchestown RTÉ2, 3.30pm Jane Mangan, with help from Andrew McNamara, Lisa O'Neill and Ruby Walsh, presents live action from Festival 2025's opening day. Coverage continues throughout the week. At the age of 72, Derry-born Eileen Sung is a latecomer to garden design, having spent her working life as a Hong Kong police officer and civil servant. Now, she's keen to prove her green-fingered credentials by creating a beautiful plot for a growing young family. Who Do You Think You Are? BBC One, 9pm Journalist and presenter Mishal Husain wants to know about her grandmother's family, especially rumours that her great-great-grandfather, Thomas Quinn, had his roots in Ireland and became a maharaja's personal physician. The Bridge on the River Kwai Film4, 5.45pm David Lean's enthralling wartime drama stars Alec Guinness as a British PoW who becomes dangerously obsessed with building a bridge for his Japanese captors. William Holden and Jack Hawkins play the commandos sent to blow it up. Chef's Table: Legends Netflix, streaming now Celebrating culinary icons shaping modern food while marking the franchise's 10th anniversary, this series showcases four legendary chefs whose influence inspires generations globally. And one of them is Jamie Oliver. You Netflix, streaming now I won't lie, I haven't viewed even a single episode of this on account of the hammy narration provided by Penn Badgley's psychotic Joe (watching through Gogglebox was more than enough) and the parade of gormless sorts he's managed to slay on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, for season 5 (yes, five seasons) and 'the killer finale', he's back in New York to address yet more skeletons in his closet. Wear Whatever The F You Want Prime Video, streaming now Also returning to New York for another season, we have Clinton Kelly and Stacy London inspiring those in a fashion funk to express their unique style, even if it breaks all the style rules. To save a politician's estranged son after a failed drug deal, a perpetually dishevelled detective (Tom Hardy) rampages through the criminal underworld, revealing layers of corruption permeating East LA. This is quite the filming feat, given it was partially shot in the mean streets of Barry Island Pleasure Park, Wales. Chronicling Freddie Flintoff's remarkable cricket career, multitude of presenting gigs (A League of Their Own, Living With Bulimia, Australian Ninja Warrior), two Ashes wins with England, his status as a national sporting icon, and his return to cricket after a life-altering Top Gear car crash in 2022. If you only visit Disney+ to watch Star Wars-related fodder, there are new episodes of Andor: A Star Wars Story.
NZ Herald
21-04-2025
- NZ Herald
Exploring Thailand's wild west: Kanchanaburi and the Death Railway
The bridge over the River Kwai in Kanchanaburi is something of an anticlimax — it's a bit like any other metal bridge — though due to the huge popularity of the 1957 movie (The Bridge on the River Kwai), it's a popular spot for selfies. To get a sense of what happened here in the 1940s, take an eye-opening visit to the Thailand-Burma Railway Centre and the adjacent Don Rak War Cemetery, both just a block away from the train station. The museum gives a clear overview of the construction of the railway, and the chilling memorial slabs in the cemetery reveal most men laid to rest here were under 25 years old. In their rush to conquer southeast Asia during the Second World War, the Japanese desperately needed a rail link between Bangkok and Rangoon, so they forced bot h Asian and Allied prisoners of war to work around the clock, laying tracks in the malaria-infested jungle. To get a closer look at the conditions faced by these prisoners, hop on a two-hour train ride from Kanchanaburi to Nam Tok, which passes through deep rock cuttings and over a precarious viaduct at Wang Pho, where nearly every man working on the railway died. In fact, it's thought one man died for every sleeper laid along this track. Though the line originally stretched over 400km, it now ends at Nam Tok, just 130km from Kanchanaburi. Perhaps the most moving place along the entire route of the Death Railway is Hellfire Pass, about 20km north of Nam Tok. The pass is so-called because of the scary torches the prisoners had to carry to work through the night, hacking at the rock with primitive tools. These days, the pass is the location of the excellent Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum, with POW memorabilia, photos and informative display boards, while a walk through the deep cutting of the pass itself, now silent rather than echoing with the clang of metal on rock, is a sobering experience. On Anzac Day (April 25), a Dawn Service is held here, starting at 5am, to honour the thousands of Australian, New Zealand, British and Dutch soldiers who died here, followed by a gunfire breakfast (coffee with rum). Anzac stands for 'Australian and New Zealand Army Corps', and Anzac Day marks the anniversary of the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli in 1915, and it is commemorated in various locations internationally. Having come this far into Thailand's wild west, it would be foolish to turn back without visiting Sangkhlaburi, the last Thai town of any size before the border with Myanmar. Its setting beside the huge Khao Laem Reservoir, with the view of the 400m wooden bridge connecting nearby Ban Waeng Ka, is extremely picturesque, and adventurers who arrive here are immediately drawn into the slow-life ambience of the place. The old town of 'Sangkhla', as it's known to locals, was lost when the reservoir was created, but there is still an interesting temple called Wat Saam Prasob, partly submerged, which can be visited by boat and makes for interesting photos. Sangkhla is only 24km from the border, so it's tempting to complete this exploration of Thailand's wild west by heading up to the Three Pagodas Pass. Apparently, the pagodas or stupas were erected to acknowledge a peace pact by Thai and Burmese kings in the 18th century, but if their minuscule size is anything to go by, the pact was not entered into with any great verve. To balance the serious tone of the Death Railway trip, when back in Kanchanaburi, head out for a day of fun with rescued elephants at Elephants' World, or cool off at the Erawan Falls in the Erawan National Park or the Mae Khamin Falls in the Srinakarind National Park, a bit further afield. Both falls have seven levels, but being nearer to Kanchanaburi, the Erewan Falls, with their milky, turquoise waters, are much more popular. The Mae Khamin Falls offer a less crowded and more contemplative experience, and the crystal-clear waters streaming over caramel-coloured ledges make a stellar backdrop for selfies.
