My second favourite movie of all time

Rating: 10/10 (23 January 2001)

Schindler's List is one of the best movies ever made, for many different reasons. I could repeat what has already been said on this list about the brilliant acting, direction and cinematography. But you already know all that stuff. What makes the film great for me, though, is the way it shows humans at their truest, improvising and scrounging to survive. This is what life is all about: trying to stay alive no matter what the circumstances around us.
The film is amazing in its restraint and subtlety. It would have been so easy for the movie to step on a soapbox and tell us all about the negative factors that led to the Holocaust. Instead it simply depicts one little corner of that massive evil, and shows how a few people outsmarted it, and did survive. The film trusts our own intelligence, and lets us draw our own conclusions about why Schindler changed, and also what the Nazis were like. Another thing I loved about the film is that Spielberg resisted the temptation to paint the Nazis as mindless villains. Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth is seen as having the same passions and mannerisms as Schindler himself. But somewhere along the line Goeth strayed from the path of good, and from that we can see that the line between good and evil is a fine one.
This is a masterful film. Fantastic acting, superb pacing by Spielberg, beautiful lighting and photography, great music, and extremely intelligent and profound insights into human nature. What more could you ask?