A really tough call to pick one movie for this week. Should I go for the excellent, ground-breaking but ultimately fluffy Toy Story, or the moving Oscar-winning and ultimately serious Schindler’s List? In the end I plumped for something that in a sense could be said to sit between those two extremes. The Shawshank Redemption has retained its place in my "top ten movies of all time" since its first release but, amazingly, did not do particularly well at the box office, relying on DVD, video, TV and good old word-of-mouth to gradually secure its place in far more esoteric top tens than mine.

Part of the film’s appeal is the near-perfect casting of Tim Robbins as fresh-faced innocent banker Andy Dufresne who is wrongly convicted of the double murder of his wife and her lover, and Morgan Freeman as Ellis Boyd Redding, universally known as ‘Red’, who is the prison fixer and dispenser of the homespun philosophy that gives Andy the hope he needs to survive his experiences in Shawshank Prison. Freeman is brilliant in just about everything he appears in but he slips into the part of Red like a second skin. It may as well have been written for him.

Over the course of his many years’ incarceration, Andy earns the respect of his fellow inmates and the prison staff and never loses the fiercely burning hope that one day his innocence will be proven and his body will be as free as his spirit.

The Shawshank Redemption: C4, 9.25pm Saturday 24 March

Worth a look:

Toy Story: BBC One, 6.20pm, Saturday 24 March
Chocolat: BBC Two, 9.25pm, Saturday 24 March
White Heat: TCM, 11am, Sunday 25 March
Schindler’s List: ITV3, 10pm, Sunday 25 March
The Haunting: TCM, 11pm, Monday 26 March