When illegal card dealer and recovering heroin addict Frankie Machine gets out of prison, he decides to straighten up. Armed with nothing but an old drum set, Frankie tries to get honest work as a drummer. But when his former employer and his old drug dealer re-enter his life, Frankie finds it hard to stay clean and eventually finds himself succumbing to his old habits.
20 volunteers agree to take part in a seemingly well-paid experiment advertised by the university. It is supposed to be about aggressive behavior in an artificial prison situation. A journalist senses a story behind the ad and smuggles himself in among the test subjects. They are randomly divided into prisoners and guards. What seems like a game at the beginning soon turns into bloody seriousness.
People in the future live in a totalitarian society. A technician named THX 1138 lives a mundane life between work and taking a controlled consumption of drugs that the government uses to make puppets out of people. As THX is without drugs for the first time he has feelings for a woman and they start a secret relationship.
A tormented jazz musician finds himself lost in an enigmatic story involving murder, surveillance, gangsters, doppelgängers, and an impossible transformation inside a prison cell.
Aspiring comic Rupert Pupkin attempts to achieve success in show business by stalking his idol, a late night talk-show host who craves his own privacy.
Imprisoned in the 1940s for the double murder of his wife and her lover, upstanding banker Andy Dufresne begins a new life at the Shawshank prison, where he puts his accounting skills to work for an amoral warden. During his long stretch in prison, Dufresne comes to be admired by the other inmates -- including an older prisoner named Red -- for his integrity and unquenchable sense of hope.
A quiet man is abruptly arrested without explanation, thrust into a surreal legal nightmare where truth and identity blur. As he fights to assert his innocence, he confronts a chilling system that seems more interested in control than justice.
A chronicle of country music legend Johnny Cash's life, from his early days on an Arkansas cotton farm to his rise to fame with Sun Records in Memphis, where he recorded alongside Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins.
Derek Vineyard is paroled after serving 3 years in prison for killing two African-American men. Through his brother, Danny Vineyard's narration, we learn that before going to prison, Derek was a skinhead and the leader of a violent white supremacist gang that committed acts of racial crime throughout L.A. and his actions greatly influenced Danny. Reformed and fresh out of prison, Derek severs contact with the gang and becomes determined to keep Danny from going down the same violent path as he did.
After graduation, a young woman gets his first job in the women's prison in the province. The story follows her struggle to survive in a small town with her small child, alcohol addiction, and the battle with the prisoners and prison brutality and other schemers who wanted to remove her from working spot.
When Martin, a former GDR citizen, is released from jail, he lately becomes confronted with the consequences of the German re-unification.
A Finnish man goes to the city to find a job after the mine where he worked is closed and his father commits suicide.
Hamza, a powerful county landowner killed a hardworking villager named Ahmet. Soon after this incident, Ahmet's son, Ali, shot the landowner to death. Ali was imprisoned for 12 years before being released and then, in his turn, chased by the landowner's children...
A tribute to the controversial black activist and leader of the struggle for black liberation. He hit bottom during his imprisonment in the '50s, he became a Black Muslim and then a leader in the Nation of Islam. His assassination in 1965 left a legacy of self-determination and racial pride.
The story of Salvador Puig Antich, one of the last political prisoners to be executed under Franco's Fascist State in 1974.
In Depression-era West Virginia, a serial-killing preacher hunts two young children who know the whereabouts of a stash of money.
The true story of the Mauritanian Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was held at the U.S military's Guantanamo Bay detention center without charges for over a decade and sought help from a defense attorney for his release.
Sam Bowden is a small-town corporate attorney. Max Cady is a tattooed, cigar-smoking, Bible-quoting, psychotic rapist. What do they have in common? 14 years ago, Sam was a public defender assigned to Max Cady's rape trial, and he made a serious error: he hid a document from his illiterate client that could have gotten him acquitted. Now, the cagey Cady has been released, and he intends to teach Sam Bowden and his family a thing or two about loss.
The new warden of a small prison farm in Arkansas tries to clean it up of corruption after initially posing as an inmate.
Almost casually, the young concrete worker Bastian kills a tramp. The police believe it was an accident and so the murder remains undiscovered for the time being.