Best Prison movies of 1980s

Actors : Peter O'Toole, John Lone, Ruocheng Ying, Joan Chen,
Directors : Bernardo Bertolucci,

The story of the final Emperor of China.

Actors : Michael Rooker, Tom Towles, Tracy Arnold, Mary Demas,
Directors : John McNaughton,

Henry, a drifter, commits a series of brutal murders, supposedly operating with impunity.

Actors : Nick Nolte, Frank McRae, Eddie Murphy, Annette O'Toole,
Directors : Walter Hill,

A hard-nosed cop reluctantly teams up with a wise-cracking criminal temporarily paroled to him, in order to track down a killer.

Actors : Bill McKinney, Richard Crenna, Sylvester Stallone, Brian Dennehy,
Directors : Ted Kotcheff,

Former Green Beret John Rambo is pursued into the mountains surrounding a small town by a tyrannical sheriff and his deputies, forcing him to survive using his combat skills.

Actors : J.E. Freeman, Willem Dafoe, Laura Dern, Nicolas Cage,
Directors : David Lynch,

Young lovers Sailor and Lula run from the variety of weirdos that Lula's mom has hired to kill Sailor.

Actors : Maria Conchita Alonso, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Yaphet Kotto, Jim Brown,
Directors : Paul Michael Glaser,

A wrongly convicted man must try to survive a public execution gauntlet staged as a game show.

Actors : Sonia Braga, Raul Julia, José Lewgoy, William Hurt,
Directors : Hector Babenco,

A gay man and a political prisoner are together in a prison. The gay man narrates the stories of two fake movies and his own life.

Actors : Lea Thompson, C. Thomas Howell, Charlie Sheen, Patrick Swayze,
Directors : John Milius,

It is the dawn of World War III. In mid-western America, a group of teenagers bands together to defend their town, and their country, from invading Soviet forces.

Actors : Kurt Russell, Donald Pleasence, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Van Cleef,
Directors : John Carpenter,

In 1997, when the U.S. president crashes into Manhattan, now a giant maximum security prison, a convicted bank robber is sent in to rescue him.

Actors : Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Jackie Cooper, Christopher Reeve,
Directors : Sidney J. Furie,

The Man of Steel crusades for nuclear disarmament and meets Lex Luthor's latest creation, Nuclear Man.

Actors : JoBeth Williams, Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Georg Stanford Brown,
Directors : Sidney Poitier,

Set up and wrongfully accused, two best friends will be sent to prison for a crime they didn't commit, however, no prison cell could keep them locked in.

Actors : Morgan Freeman, Robert Redford, Yaphet Kotto, Jane Alexander,
Directors : Stuart Rosenberg,

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

Actors : Kurt Russell, Sylvester Stallone, Teri Hatcher, Jack Palance,

Two cops are framed and must clear their names.

Actors : Steven Berkoff, Richard Crenna, Sylvester Stallone, Charles Napier,
Directors : George P. Cosmatos,

John Rambo is released from prison by the government for a top-secret covert mission to the last place on Earth he'd want to return - the jungles of Vietnam.

Actors : Sonny Landham, Sylvester Stallone, John Amos, Donald Sutherland,
Directors : John Flynn,

With only six months left of his sentence, inmate Frank Leone is transferred from a minimum security prison to a maximum security prison by a vindictive warden.

Actors : Nicoletta Braschi, Tom Waits, John Lurie, Roberto Benigni,
Directors : Jim Jarmusch,

Two innocent people are arrested. An interesting third person, with broken English, joins them in their cell. On his idea, they decide to escape from the prison. Their journey is the rest of the movie.

Actors : Robert John Burke, Adrienne Shelly, Chris Cooke, Julia McNeal,
Directors : Hal Hartley,

A man returns to his home town after serving a prison sentence for homicide, and finds that the details of the crime have been forgotten and replaced with local legends and rumors.

Actors : David Bowie, Takeshi Kitano, Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto,
Directors : Nagisa Ôshima,

During WWII, a British colonel tries to bridge the cultural divides between a British POW and the Japanese camp commander in order to avoid bloodshed.

Actors : Bryan Brown, Jack Thompson, Edward Woodward, John Waters,
Directors : Bruce Beresford,

Three Australian lieutenants are court martialed for executing prisoners as a way of deflecting attention from war crimes committed by their superior officers.

Actors : Ray Sharkey, Margot Kidder, Ronny Cox, Richard Pryor,
Directors : Michael Pressman,

A Vietnam vet returns home from a prisoner of war camp and is greeted as a hero, but is quickly forgotten and soon discovers how tough survival is in his own country.