No film here is good or bad. It is only like something.

2017 · Family

A small bear with very good manners takes odd jobs around London to buy his aunt a birthday present, then loses it to a thief nobody believes exists. He keeps his temper and his marmalade habit throughout.

• LightStrongly light
• SimpleClearly simple

2014 · Comedy

A famous hotel concierge between the wars takes on a new lobby boy, inherits a painting from a wealthy guest, and is accused of her murder. It is told as a story inside a story inside a story, at speed.

Sits near the middle on every axis.

1998 · Drama

A former neo-Nazi comes out of prison set on pulling his younger brother back from the movement he helped build. Told in two strands, the present in colour and the past in black and white.

• HeavyStrongly heavy
• RealisticStrongly realistic

2016 · Thriller

A woman wakes from a car crash in a locked underground bunker, where the man who put her there says the air outside will kill her. Nearly all of it is three people in a few small rooms.

• IntimateStrongly intimate

2009 · Crime

A nineteen-year-old with no family and no schooling starts a six-year sentence, and the Corsican men who run the prison put him to work. It takes its time, and the violence is sudden and close.

• HeavyStrongly heavy
• RealisticClearly realistic

2000 · Animation

The hens on a Yorkshire chicken farm keep trying to get over the fence, and then a rooster who says he can fly drops in. Stop-motion, quick, and built exactly like a prison break film.

• LightStrongly light
• SimpleClearly simple

2008 · Drama

In the Maze prison in 1981, Republican inmates refuse to wear uniforms or wash, and one of them stops eating. Barely any dialogue, one very long conversation in the middle, and a lot of time in cells.

• HeavyStrongly heavy
• RealisticStrongly realistic
• SlowStrongly slow
• IntimateClearly intimate

2018 · Romance

A young couple in 1970s Harlem are pulled apart when he is jailed for something he did not do, and her family sets about proving it. Slow, warm, and full of long held looks.

• SlowStrongly slow
• RealisticStrongly realistic
• Character-drivenClearly character-driven
• HeavyClearly heavy
• IntimateClearly intimate

2024 · Drama

Two Black teenagers meet at a brutal Florida reform school in the early 1960s and get each other through it. It is shot almost entirely from inside their eyes, so you see what they see and little else.

• RealisticStrongly realistic
• HeavyStrongly heavy
• Character-drivenClearly character-driven

2003 · Thriller

A man is locked in one room for fifteen years without being told why, then let out with a few days to find whoever did it. Violent and strange, and it moves like something is chasing it.

• HeavyStrongly heavy

2015 · Drama

A woman and her five-year-old son live in a single locked room, which is the only world he has ever known. Told from the boy's side of it, in a small space with two people.

• RealisticStrongly realistic
• HeavyStrongly heavy
• Character-drivenStrongly character-driven
• IntimateStrongly intimate

2023 · Drama

Men in a maximum security prison put on plays, and this year they are writing their own comedy, with a new member who is not sure he wants in. Mostly rehearsals and talk, played by men who were actually there.

• RealisticStrongly realistic
• Character-drivenStrongly character-driven
• IntimateClearly intimate

2016 · Horror

A man with many personalities takes three teenage girls and locks them in a room underground, and they have to work out which of him they are talking to. Mostly a few rooms, one actor playing most of it.

• IntimateClearly intimate

2019 · Horror

In a tower prison where a table of food is lowered floor by floor, the people at the top eat first and the people below get what is left. One cell, two men at a time, and it is not shy about the point.

• HeavyStrongly heavy
• IntimateClearly intimate

2010 · Animation

Andy is leaving for college, and his toys end up donated to a daycare full of children who play rough. Funny and fast for children, and heavier in places than you might expect.

• FantasticClearly fantastic