American prison/courtroom dramas get more brutal and uncompromising by the year. But their emotive power is as great as ever: too bad for the history of America's penal system that the stories they tell are so often true. The treatment meted out at Alcatraz to escapee Henri Young (Kevin Bacon) is so inhumane as to be almost unwatchable. Beaten and degraded, he spent more than three years in filthy, windowless solitary - 'the hole' - before emerging to plunge a spoon into the neck of the convict who ratted on the escape. Even after his release from solitary, he was crippled for life with a razor by the sadistic associate warden (Gary Oldman). Such men as this officer then (in 1941) thought they were above the law. But they reckon without a young attorney (Christian Slater) on his first case, who desperately tries to befriend a near-catatonic Young to save him from the gas chamber. This is first-rate, unflinching drama, appalling and sensational in every sense. Slater and Oldman are excellent, and Bacon is just amazing as the prisoner: a performance to die for.

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