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.

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.

(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.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/feb/08/roger-deakins-c...

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)

> 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.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2003/jun/05/news2

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

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.

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.

Roger Ebert is way to "fake" for my taste but broken clock and all that.

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.

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.