Best movies like Papillon

This fact-based prison drama tells the tale of a band of prisoners living in the innovative 2,600-acre prison at Chino, California. The place takes a humanistic approach to reform and there are no armed guards, no lockups and no uniforms. The underlying philosophy is that if these things are not there, the prisoners will not want to escape, and will instead accept their punishment. A new inmate arrives and soon accustoms himself to the new idea. The story includes the Oscar nominated song Unchained Melody.

In 1850, on the isolated French island of Saint-Pierre, a murder shocks the natives. Two fishermen are arrested. One of them, Louis Ollivier, dies in custody. The other, Neel Auguste, is sentenced to death by the guillotine. The island is so small that it has neither a guillotine nor an executioner. While those are sent for Auguste is placed under the supervision of an army Captain.

In the year 2022, a ruthless prison warden has created the ultimate solution for his most troublesome and violent inmates: Absolom, a secret jungle island where prisoners are abandoned and left to die. But Marine Captain John Robbins, convicted of murdering a commanding officer, is determined to escape the island in order to reveal the truth behind his murderous actions and clear his name.

Redemption tells the story of Stan "Tookie" Williams, founder of the Crips L.A. street gang. Story follows his fall into gang-banging, his prison term, and his work writing children's novels encouraging peace and anti-violence resolutions which earned him multiple Nobel Peace Prize nominations. After exhausting all forms of appeal, Tookie was executed by lethal injection.

After killing a prison guard, convict Robert Stroud faces life imprisonment in solitary confinement. Driven nearly mad by loneliness and despair, Stroud's life gains new meaning when he happens upon a helpless baby sparrow in the exercise yard and nurses it back to health. Despite having only a third grade education, Stroud goes on to become a renowned ornithologist and achieves a greater sense of freedom and purpose behind bars than most people find in the outside world.

When two troublemaking female prisoners (one a revolutionary, the other a former harem-girl) can't seem to get along, they are chained together and extradited for safekeeping. The women, still chained together, stumble, stab, and cat-fight their way across the wilderness, igniting a bloody shootout between gangsters and a group of revolutionaries.

The new warden of a small prison farm in Arkansas tries to clean it up of corruption after initially posing as an inmate.

Framed in the 1940s for the double murder of his wife and her lover, upstanding banker Andy Dufresne begins a new life at the Shawshank prison, where he puts his accounting skills to work for an amoral warden. During his long stretch in prison, Dufresne comes to be admired by the other inmates -- including an older prisoner named Red -- for his integrity and unquenchable sense of hope.

A supernatural tale set on death row in a Southern prison, where gentle giant John Coffey possesses the mysterious power to heal people's ailments. When the cell block's head guard, Paul Edgecomb, recognizes Coffey's miraculous gift, he tries desperately to help stave off the condemned man's execution.

When petty criminal Luke Jackson is sentenced to two years in a Florida prison farm, he doesn't play by the rules of either the sadistic warden or the yard's resident heavy, Dragline, who ends up admiring the new guy's unbreakable will. Luke's bravado, even in the face of repeated stints in the prison's dreaded solitary confinement cell, "the box," make him a rebel hero to his fellow convicts and a thorn in the side of the prison officers.

The Nazis, exasperated at the number of escapes from their prison camps by a relatively small number of Allied prisoners, relocate them to a high-security 'escape-proof' camp to sit out the remainder of the war. Undaunted, the prisoners plan one of the most ambitious escape attempts of World War II. Based on a true story.

Henri “Papillon” Charrière, a safecracker from the Parisian underworld, is wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony of French Guiana, where he forges a strong friendship with Louis Dega, a counterfeiter who needs his protection.

Billy Hayes is caught attempting to smuggle drugs out of Turkey. The Turkish courts decide to make an example of him, sentencing him to more than 30 years in prison. Hayes has two opportunities for release: the appeals made by his lawyer, his family, and the American government, or the "Midnight Express".

San Francisco Bay, January 18, 1960. Frank Lee Morris is transferred to Alcatraz, a maximum security prison located on a rocky island. Although no one has ever managed to escape from there, Frank and other inmates begin to carefully prepare an escape plan.

Female prisoners in a Phillippine jail are being subjected to sadistic torture. Five of the women--along with the help of two men--plot an escape.

When Colin Warner was wrongfully convicted of murder, his best friend Carl King devoted his life to proving his innocence.

A German U-Boat commander and 600 prisoners plan a daring escape from a PoW camp in Scotland.

Frank Leone is nearing the end of his prison term for a relatively minor crime. Just before he is paroled, however, Warden Drumgoole takes charge. Drumgoole was assigned to a hell-hole prison after his administration was publicly humiliated by Leone, and has now arrived on the scene to ensure that Leone never sees the light of day.

The true story of WWII's notorious Sobibor Nazi death camp, where a courageous inmate orchestrates and leads the escape of over 300 prisoners.

Frank Perry is an institutionalized convict twelve years into a life sentence without parole. When his estranged daughter falls ill, he is determined to make peace with her before it's too late. He develops an ingenious escape plan, and recruits a dysfunctional band of escapists - misfits with a mutual dislike for one other but united by their desire to escape their hell hole of an existence.

Imprisoned Harry Lomart is a vicious, brute of a man and yet he is prepared to do his long jail term as he is confident that on his release his beautiful wife Pat will be waiting for him, but a visit from Pat brings him his worst nightmare.

Sugar State Women’s Prison. An Everglades hellhole where innocent girls are forced to slave in the swamps by day then turn tricks for the warden by night. A prison camp where corruption, brutality, and sexual abuse are all part of the daily routine. But when reporter Valerie March goes undercover inside Sugar State, that’s when the powder keg really explodes! Follow Valerie through prison life - catfights, knife fights, rape, whippings, prostitution, and the “hot box” - before she and her fellow inmates take bloody, unforgettable revenge on their captors. Inspired by the great women-in-prison films of the past, SUGAR BOXX takes everything one step further. SUGAR BOXX has it all.

Two men in 1930s Mississippi become friends after being sentenced to life in prison together for a crime they did not commit.

Inspired by a true story. A petty criminal sent to Alcatraz in the 1930s is caught attempting to make an escape. As punishment he is put in solitary confinement. The maximum stay is supposed to be 19 days, but Henri spends years alone, cold and in complete darkness, only to emerge a madman and soon to be a murderer. The story follows a rookie lawyer attempting to prove that Alcatraz was to blame.

Laurel and Hardy are convicts making an escape from prison.

Monroe Hutchens is the heavyweight champion of Sweetwater, a maximum security prison. He was convicted to a life sentence due to a passionate crime. Iceman Chambers is the heavyweight champion, who lost his title due to a rape conviction to ten years in Sweetwater. WHen these two giants collide in the same prison, they fight against each other disputing who is the real champion.

While fighting for a woman who sits on death row, a lawyer happens upon new information which brings into question the motives of a man associated with her client

A group of prisoners, led by an armed robber and a gangster, attempt to escape from the infamous Alcatraz Island.

A man is executed in the electric chair for having killed several women, but due to lightning striking a transformer at the moment of execution, he survives. As soon as he's well, however, they plan to electrocute him again, but now he has become a changed man and the female criminal psychiatrist attributes it to the electrocution wiping out certain brain cells.

After his death sentence is commuted to life in prison, John Resko is transferred from Sing-Sing to Dannemora where, with the help of a humane prison guard, he becomes a rehabilitated man and a successful painter.

A group of officers based in a labyrinthine top-secret prison must fight for their lives against Hatchet, a brilliant and infamous high-value detainee. When he escapes, his mysterious and deadly agenda has far reaching and dire consequences.

A bush pilot is hired for $50,000 to go to Mexico to free an innocent prisoner.

In 1916, a group of prisoners plot their escape from the notorious fortress located in French Guiana.

A jailed auto mechanic must run for his life after he witnesses the murder of a fellow inmate by two prison guards.

US Marshal Gid McCool leads a wagon train of convicted felons to Huntsville prison. The only female among the crooks is the dancehall girl Laura Mannon, McCool's former flame. When McCool cannot be swayed from completing his lawful duty, Laura tries to endear herself to shotgun rider Mike Reno in hopes he will set her free.