Right at the Top of My List!

Rating: 10/10 (18 March 2015)

In Schindler's List, we see images that we never thought we would ever see in a non-documentary film. It will kick you in the stomach and not stop until you can't take anymore. It will twist your finger and force you to open your eyes and take in things you would hope to never see in your whole life.
The movie follows the story of Oskar Schindler, an entrepreneur who exploits Krakow Jews, only to later become their friend and redeemer. He keeps thousands of them in his factory and out of the camps while challenging and manipulating the venomous S.S. officer Amon Goeth with the help of his Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern. During its 195 minutes runtime, Schindler undergoes a subtle transformation, from a self-indulgent exploiter of slave labor to savior with a mission and finally to a hero in hiding.
Shot entirely in black and white, Schindler's List is certainly the most intense and uncompromising depiction of the Nazi horror ever to appear in a fiction film. Steven Spielberg directs this poignant drama with an incredible amount of uplifting hope, once again underlining the undeniable splendor of his craft. The detached reticence with which Spielberg captures the Nazis' savagery only adds to that effect. He does not use one trite shot, one forced tear-jerking assemblage. Tears are evoked, but honorably! Initially, the absence of color (with the exception of one haunting, recurring figure) may seem to spare us the gore. But it has the opposite effect: When a guard shoots a kneeling man in the back of the head, the black blood that oozes out is even more unsettling.
Headlining the magnificent cast is the hitherto underrated Liam Neeson who inhabits Schindler with such authority that you cannot envisage any other actor do justice to this 'role of a lifetime'. Ralph Fiennes is simultaneously terrifying and fascinating as the S.S. Officer Amon Goeth. Watch him muse to his Jewish mistress "I realize that you are not a person in the strictest sense of the word" and you will be convinced how Fiennes was clearly robbed off his Oscar. The other key part is Schindler's Jewish accountant, played with self-effacing brilliance by Ben Kingsley, who lends the movie just the right amount of warmth.
Marked by a brilliant screenplay and an attitude toward the traumatic subject matter that is both passionately felt and impressively restrained, this is the film to win over Spielberg skeptics.