alt Hacker NewsRoger Ebert Reviews "The Shawshank Redemption" (1999)
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This is one of my favorite movies, yet it won 0 Oscars (nominated for 7) and was a box office flop (cost $25M to make and box office proceeds were $28M). It only gained popularity after the theatres from the VHS rental market.
I firmly believe part of the initial commercial failure was because of the title. With something more descriptive like, "Escape from Shawshank" or just "Prison Break" people would have been more interested to see it.
Roger Ebert was a national treasure. The saga of his review of director Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny" [1] always makes me laugh:
> American critic Roger Ebert has hit back at Vincent Gallo in the latest round of a public spat over whether the actor-director did or did not apologise for his derided Cannes contender The Brown Bunny. Earlier this week Gallo denied having apologised and claimed the critic was "a fat pig" for saying that he had. He added: "The only thing I'm sorry for is putting a curse of Roger Ebert's colon."
> Yesterday, in his column for the Chicago Sun Times, Ebert stuck to his guns - quoting the editor of trade magazine Screen International, who says that they have Gallo's apology on tape. On the question of his cursed colon, Ebert said: "I am not too worried. I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny."
> The critic rounded off his article (as it were) by casually conceding that he is overweight. "It is true that I am fat," Ebert wrote. "But one day I shall be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny."
Later on, Gallo went back to the editing room and cut a quarter of the film. Ebert re-watched it and actually ended up giving it a thumbs' up.
> [...]and the redemption, when it comes, is Red’s.
(spoilers)
It never sat right with me that Andy is shown to be innocent, and some viciously evil irrelevant character did it instead. This, I thought, takes away the whole redemption aspect of the movie, turning Andy into an innocent Mary Sue. I'd never considered that it may be more about Red's character instead. Though I didn't catch a satisfying explanation for that idea in the review, and it's been a long time since I watched the move.
I think I'll rewatch it today.
Coincidentally there is an interview with Roger Deakins, who did the cinematography on Shawshank, as well as many other excellent films, in The Guardian today.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/feb/08/roger-deakins-c...
This generation will never experience the joy of flipping on network tv on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, seeing Shawshank on, sitting down and just watching it, even though you’ve seen it countless times and it’s the tv-edited commercial filled version.
Quite a few classics like this and "Office Space" were box office flops that were resurrected by the magic of VHS/DVD. Yet those are gone too. Is there any room left for the "sleeper hit" in 2026?
Roger Ebert writing style was so polished. I wish I could write like this. My writing tends to be quite dry to the extent that GPTzero flagged it as written by AI. The reason given was "the lack of a creative use of grammar."
On a separate note, although vastly different, Fight Club was also not very successful on the box office (domestically made losses) but became a hit on DVDs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club)
"Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" is one of my favourite Stephen King short stories (From "Different Seasons"). I actually read it after watching the film (which is just amazing) and still ended up liking the short story more than the film. I would highly recommend it to just about anyone.
I feel that anyone that has ever suffered an injustice (and who hasn’t at some time or another) can relate to this film. And survivors of all kinds can understand what it means to “crawl through a river of shit” to earn their reprieve.
Are there any new Eberts? The review landscape feels like it still hasn't exited his shadow but needs to evolve.
(1999) (The movie is from 1994, the review is from 1999.)
In 1995, our art teacher used a full week of class time to screen this for us, for no other reason than she felt it was an incredible film that deserved a wider audience. She was right.
In my opinion, the costs to make movies have gone down so much that you will find sincerity not only in high production value releases but also in YouTube and vlogs.
I recently saw it as a play in a theater, and although I had my reservations regarding this, the result was an interesting experience. The minimalist staging shifted the focus to the performances and the emotional weight of the story, highlighting the quiet persistence of hope.
The title of the play also differed from the movie, Rita Hayworth: Last Exit, which feels somewhat like a spoiler. I believe this was the title used by the Greek distributor.
It's a fine movie, agreed. The movie's focus isn't on revenge, but on the interaction between the protagonists. Anyways, the story outline heavily reminds me of the classic "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Dumas.
Disclaimer: I never read Stephen King's original short story, on which the movie is based, so I cannot say how this compares to Dumas' classic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo
If you go to Ebert's wikipedia, you can almost miss the link to the screenplay he wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Valley_of_the_Dolls
This was co-produced with Russ Meyer, who basically made a bunch films which are as close to porn as you can get without being technically porn. He also made a ton of porn films as well. I haven't seen any of them, but many are now cult films. It feels debatable that he intended these to become cultural relics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Meyer
I was surprised to see Roger Ebert was involved in that film! Gene Siskel, his long time partner, rated Valley of the Dolls 0 out of 4 stars, which is funny.
Sometimes I think I'm the only person in the world who doesn't like this film.
Very strange that the cast list on this web page doesn't include Morgan Freeman.
> It is a strange comment to make about a film set inside a prison, but “The Shawshank Redemption” creates a warm hold on our feelings because it makes us a member of a family. Many movies offer us vicarious experiences and quick, superficial emotions. “Shawshank” slows down and looks. It uses the narrator’s calm, observant voice to include us in the story of men who have formed a community behind bars. It is deeper than most films; about continuity in a lifetime, based on friendship and hope.
I think Ebert is a brilliant reviewer; here I think something is overlooked: I agree about the emotional tone but not about the effect or the truth behind it. The prison is a fearful, traumatic place, of rape you can't stop, where life hangs by a thread, you take risks (for example with the bookkeeping) living on a razor's edge. The constant danger hangs over everything - you might not survive the day, you might be assaulted again, today might be the day they look more closely at what you're doing and you're caught.
That belies the calm narration and friendship. They provide an island of hope and love amid the trauma, in stark contrast to it, in constant tension with it.
You might say the narration is a device to make it palatable to middle-class audiences. That's something I notice a lot in Hollywood. First, the protagonist is someone they can identify with - a banker, a middle-class job - wrongly convicted, in this horrible situation. They are not, for example, a homeless person or someone semi-employed doing manual labor (someone much more likely to be wrongly convicted) - that would be a different movie and much less empathetic for many viewers, though objectively exactly as horrible. Then you have this calm, warm, reasonable voice telling the story - not a voice of terror or hate or trauma; that would be too much; the voice says 'it's ok'.
As Ebert says,
> The movie avoids lingering on Andy’s suffering; after beatings, he’s seen in medium and long shot, tactfully. The camera doesn’t focus on Andy’s wounds or bruises, but, like his fellow prisoners, gives him his space.
And I think also the following claim goes much too far:
> His film grants itself a leisure that most films are afraid to risk. The movie is as deliberate, considered and thoughtful as Freeman’s narration. There’s a feeling in Hollywood that audiences have short attention spans and must be assaulted with fresh novelties.
Sure, it's not the Avengers but it's a movie where the main plot elements are prison violence, a prison escape, and a grand con. This isn't Tokyo Story or In the Mood for Love.
What’s an equivalent movie in contemporary times? Not pretentious, sincere and relies on dialogue and story telling?
I kind of hated movies like Manchester By The Sea, American Sniper, Banshees of Insherin.
They all feel not so sincere to me. There’s something about them - a technique where audience exposition is deliberately toned down to such an extent that it’s just scene after scene with no soul.
> There’s a feeling in Hollywood that audiences have short attention spans and must be assaulted with fresh novelties. I think such movies are slower to sit through than a film like “Shawshank,” which absorbs us and takes away the awareness that we are watching a film.
This resonates with me and is a really concise way to explain why, to me, a 2 to 2.5 hour long Marvel or Transformers movie feels like an eternity, while a movie like Shawshank never has me checking my watch.