The cruelest film ever made. This is the closest we will ever come to witnessing pure evil in film.

Rating: Null/10 (8 September 2008)

This, to me, is the cruelest film ever made. Sure, there have been many films that have depicted cruelty in it's most realistic and most non discriminating. LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL showed us a very true depiction of the holocaust. CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST showed us how far people will go to be known and to be famous. IRREVERSIBLE showed us a nine and a half minute rape scene that is nearly impossible to watch and to sit through without being forever haunted by it. SALO' OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM showed us pure innocence being destroyed and defiled by political right-wingers. HAPPINESS showed us how deeply depraved and how inhuman and mentally deformed some seemingly "normal" people are. VISITOR Q depicted a family whose members indulge in the most disgusting, horrific, and depraved and don't even seem to know that what they are all doing is wrong. MONSTER was a film in which a prostitute killed her customers, not because she got a thrill out of it, but because society left her no choice. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE depicted a damaged and deranged human mind and then showed us what happens when the body that mind belongs to is no longer able to perform what the mind wants it to. PINK FLAMINGOS shows us two groups of people who act in every bad and evil activity known to mankind, knowing that it's bad and not caring. However, SCHINDLER'S LIST in my opinion, goes even further than all of those films. SCHINDLER'S LIST is a film that all of humanity should be required to watch and sit through. I refuse to watch it again. SCHINDLER'S LIST was a film that affected me so strongly and so deeply that just thinking about it frightens me. I've tried to sit through it a second time and got about halfway through, but I just couldn't handle it and I refused to finish it. SCHINDLER'S LIST is the closest we will ever come to knowing what it was like to be a part of the holocaust. It is among one of the darkest films I've ever seen in my life. The film itself is about Oskar Schindler, a member of the Nazi party, who owns a company and puts Jews to work in it. However, on the opposite side of the structure we meet a man named Amon Goeth. Goeth is a man who cares so little about the value of human life that he target practices with Jewish people in the Ghetto. To say that the violence in this film is unflinching isn't doing the violence enough justice. We don't watch the violent scenes as much as we full on witness it in at it's angriest and goriest. People are shot in this film. We don't see people firing a gun and then have the camera cut to people falling to the ground. We see people helplessly held at gun to the head and then shot like dogs. We see the blood shoot out very violently and graphically. We see it coat the faces of the victims and the executioners. We see many more horrific things. We see bodies blown apart, tossed aside, and broken apart. We see rotting corpses cooked and we see the remains rain from the sky. We see children get butchered and slaughtered as if their young lives were worthless and expendable. We see it all and we feel helpless. The people who do it don't see anything wrong with doing it and even make games and goofy gestures out of it. Many people will have a difficult time sitting through this film, but it remarkably watchable. As cruel and as brutal and dark and gory as it is, it is a flawless film. The film's ending makes it all worth sitting through. It remains to be one of the most moving and emotional ending in motion picture history. The final thirty minutes are so heart wrenching, honest, beautiful, and strong that it is worth enduring two hours and forty minutes of non-stop cruelty. The ending remains to be the of the great endings in motion picture history. We may not recover from the film, but what we gain from the ending alone makes it all worth defiling your mind.
PROS:
-Absolutely perfect performances from the entire cast and all speaking parts.
-Unflinching and honest depiction of the Nazi Holocaust of the 1940s.
-beautiful black & white cinematography.
-A true knockout of an ending!
CONS:
-none