Deakins’s work here began his run of 16 Oscar nominations... it’s a crucial part of Shawshank’s enduring legacy.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 20, 2024

If this is a feel-good movie -- and by the end it certainly is -- then at least it challenges us to dig deep for those good feelings when everything inside those mausoleum walls is unrelievedly harsh and grey.

| Mar 4, 2024

The Shawshank Redemption is both resigned and inspirational, grittily realistic and vaguely surreal, matter-of-fact and operatic. Somehow, these opposites are combined into a remarkably smooth and lyrical composition.

| Mar 4, 2024

The sad thing is that The Shawshank Redemption, a so-so film, would have made a terrific little movie. A pacier project would have given us less time to notice sentimentalities.

| Mar 4, 2024

There's nothing going on in The Shawshank Redemption from shot to shot -- no expressive life, no spontaneity or feeling. It's a stunted movie.

| Mar 4, 2024

Darabont, making his debut as a director, is swamped by ambition. There is just too much here -- too much plot, too many particulars, too many prisoners vying for attention.

| Mar 4, 2024

A hackneyed prison movie with acting so strong that it often seems more substantive than it is.

| Mar 4, 2024

The Shawshank Redemption may be working with stuff we've seen before, but it's surprisingly strong and engrossing. Even elitists in the audience who dismiss King as a shock schlockmeister may be amazed at this picture's narrative grip.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 4, 2024

Its message of hope and friendship comes premixed with a sizable dollop of unappetizing violence, intended to convince audiences that what they're watching isn't a big glob of cotton candy after all.

| Mar 4, 2024

The towering Tim Robbins has a solidity and gentle interiority that occasionally reminds one here of Burt Lancaster. Of equal excellence is Morgan Freeman as Red, who holds the film together with his poetic, often quipping narration.

| Mar 4, 2024

You've never seen a prison movie quite like it, and I found its eccentric rhythms and the performances of co-stars Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman nearly irresistible.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 4, 2024

A work of sincerity and honorable purpose, with a first-class cast... [But] Darabont has not found a way to resolve the problems and improbabilities that tower higher than the walls of the maximum security prison.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 4, 2024

Never will you be so glad of the voyeuristic nature of filmgoing. Because The Shawshank Redemption is as close to prison as you'll want to get. And Robbins and Freeman make what could have been an endurance test an utterly engrossing experience.

| Mar 4, 2024

It's a blissfully old-fashioned melodrama spanning three decades, a classic tall tale that experiences some particularly incredible growth spurts toward the end but manages to endure them without alienating the viewer.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 4, 2024

There is a quality of authenticity about The Shawshank Redemption that makes it irrelevant whether one enjoys the film as plain entertainment.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 4, 2024

Darabont has crafted an intelligent, perceptive picture. But at nearly 2.5 hours, it's an emotional endurance match, blanketing the audience with oppressive mood under which prisoners live until you feel the weight and drag of their empty days.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 4, 2024

The Shawshank Redemption is a movie that lives or dies on the capabilities of its stars. And they are eminently capable.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Mar 2, 2024

Frank Darabont has found some wonderful ways of updating clichés. Plus, there's unique sweetness in Andy and Red's relationship and these two seasoned pros savor every nuance.

| Mar 2, 2024

For a film about deceit, The Shawshank Redemption offers a smart con-trick in its own plotting: one I must not reveal, however, except to say its total improbability is pardonable because its surprise is morally exhilarating.

| Mar 2, 2024

If you can get past patchy character development and lefty underpinnings about criminal justice, The Shawshank Redemption stands as an uplifting story of enduring hope.

| Mar 2, 2024