The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Plenty of fans of this prison drama never learn it came from King, from a novella in his 1982 collection Different Seasons. Frank Darabont builds it on patience: decades pass inside the walls, and the friendship between Tim Robbins's quiet banker Andy and Morgan Freeman's Red is what keeps you watching. It earned only $16 million on its first run, yet it picked up seven Oscar nominations, later a place in the National Film Registry, and decades on it is still a television staple. Hope is the subject here, and the film earns it slowly enough that it never feels cheap.