Brubaker (1980)

Tough stuff. Brubaker is a hard-bitten and rather depressing prison-reform movie. What's so hard about it is that the real obstacle for prison reform in Brubaker is corrupt politicians.

In this way Brubaker is much, much more realistic than most prison movies, and consequently much more disheartening.

This is, however, a very well made movie, and Robert Redford and his supporting cast is great – especially David Keith.

Murder, Inc.

This is bad. Peter Falk is great, and the star, Stuart Whitman, is excellent. But this faux-documentary is poorly directed, badly shot, shoddily edited, and hastily scripted with a silly bit of moralizing at the end and an absurd narrator device that isn't introduced until midway through the picture. Shot in Cinemascope, you'd think it would be more interested in its photography, and it seems occasionally to be so, but mostly this picture is just getting by. It felt like a rush job more than anything else: a total mess.