It looks, without ever averting its gaze, at the darkest of the dark.

Rating: 9/10 (11 January 2015)

In Schindler's List, children - Steven Spielberg's long-favored vehicles for expressions of hope and sunny confidence about humanity's future - rush toward an ominous line of waiting trucks.
In their exuberant innocence, the youngsters wave a farewell whose finality they cannot know as their parents stand helpless, paralyzed by the horror of what awaits their offspring. Like many scenes in Schindler's List, this parting becomes more than an indelible, wrenching moment of shared pain. It is rendered with a restraint and a prodigious film making technique that transform an image into an act of scarcely bearable communion for the audience. The empty uplift seems contrived after the devastating power of what precedes it. But this coda does not detract from a testament in which a man finds redemption in saving others, and a director at the height of his art preserves the past with magisterial authority and conviction.