Midnight Express

Midnight Express (1978) is Alan Parker's prison drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Billy Hayes, a young American, is caught at Istanbul airport with hashish strapped to his chest, and a Turkish court decides to make him a warning to everyone else.

What looks like a manageable sentence keeps stretching into something far longer. Hayes (Brad Davis) survives a brutal, overcrowded prison where guards beat inmates on a whim and fellow prisoners like Max and Erich cling to whatever sanity they have left. Escape goes by a code name: the "midnight express," the train the convicts swear passes nearby every night and that none of them will ever board.

Oliver Stone wrote the screenplay and won an Oscar for it; Giorgio Moroder took another for a pulsing electronic score that felt radical inside a prison film. The movie remains contested, with Turkey objecting for years to how it portrays the country. That raw anger is exactly what turned it into a cult title. Stream Midnight Express (1978) online on iFILM.