deserved oscars

Rating: Null/10 (31 August 2004)

Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes star in Spielberg's award-winning Holocaust drama
Author Thomas Keneally won a Booker Prize for 'Schindler's Ark', but it took Spielberg to tell the story of shady Nazi industrialist Schindler who saved hundreds of Jews from the death camps to a worldwide audience.

It was very much a personal project for Spielberg. After the success of Jurassic Park he was able to make any film he wanted, and has said that he didn't expect many people would want to see a Jewish story. However, in Neeson's flawed hero Oskar Schindler, Kingsley's quietly desperate Jewish administrator Itzhak Stern and Fiennes's bloatedly evil concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth, Spielberg had a dramatic engine that pulls an audience along through the heartbreaking story of the enslavement and massacre of Poland's Jews.
It won buckets of Oscars, but its best tribute is the shocked, tearful silence of audiences everywhere. An outstanding, harrowing piece of cinema.

Verdict A heart-rending and redemptive Holocaust story, this Oscar-grabbing epic added to Spielberg's directorial credibility, showing he could handle controversial, sophisticated stories with real sensitivity.