Outstanding

Rating: 10/10 (7 July 2011)

Schindler's List comes about halfway in Spielberg's cinematic directing career (to date). It isn't his first (or his last) serious movie, but it is his best and, notwithstanding the enormous impact his entire output has had on the movie industry, I would go so far as to say it is the film he was born to make.
Spielberg does the impossible, in a number of ways. He takes one of the most appalling periods of how vile man can be to his fellow man and, without losing any of the emotional and visceral impact of that inhumanity, wrings something inspirational and human out of it - we watch fascinated, moved, devastated, and - if we are even halfway human ourselves - improved by the experience of watching the story unfold.
This film is brilliant in so many ways, not least of which is the fact that the protagonists - Liam Neeson's Oskar Schindler, Ralph Fiennes' Amon Goeth, and Ben Kingsley's Itzhak Stern - are no one-dimensional caricatures, created for the single purpose of delivering plot developments. No, they - and all the characters in this wonderful, harrowing film - are real people, neither all good nor all bad.
Watch it to see a truly gifted director exercising his art at the very top of his game, not that Spielberg has ever been anywhere else.