Boston Globe
It's a stunning achievement, a film that re-creates the Holocaust not as something abstract, but as felt knowledge.
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Schindler's List
The story of a Polish factory owner who witnesses the horror of the holocaust and defies the Nazi war machine by saving the Jews who suffer at its hands. This is the film that saw Steven Spielberg undeniably graduate from flashy entertainer to modern day auteur. Shot in chilling black and white, it lives on in popular imagination as the most powerful and accessible anti-Nazi message to emerge from the movies. Emotion drips from the screen and the importance of a social conscience, both for the individual and the wider society in which they live, is spelled out in profound terms. Few films before or after have matched this work’s combination of heart and technical mastery.
Winner of 7 Academy Awards including Best Film, Director and Cinematography, 1994. Best Film (Drama), Golden Globes 1994. Best Film, BAFTA Awards 1994.
1993Rating: M, contains violence and offensive language195 minsUSA
DramaTrue Story & BiographyWarHistorical
- Director:
- Steven Spielberg ('Jaws', 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind', 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', 'E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial', 'Jurassic Park')
- Writer:
- Steven Zaillian
- Cast:
- Liam NeesonBen KingsleyRalph FiennesCaroline GoodallJonathan SagallEmbeth Davidtz
Schindler's List / Reviews
The Times
The film's epic sweep and grasp of detail are exemplary, while some scenes could make even a lump of granite weep.
Full reviewChicago Tribune
With seemingly effortless grace and skill, Schindler's List balances fear and exaltation, humor and horror, love and death.
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The Guardian
Ultimately, the film is memorable as much for simple testimony as for the cinematic art it displays.
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The New Yorker
Few American movies since the silent era have had anything approaching this picture's narrative boldness, visual audacity, and emotional directness.
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Seattle Times
More than any previous non-documentary Holocaust movie, this one convinces through the accumulation of such detail.
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Variety
Evinces an artistic rigor and unsentimental intelligence unlike anything the world's most successful filmmaker has demonstrated before.
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The New York Times
But the film Schindler's List, directed with fury and immediacy by a profoundly surprising Steven Spielberg, presents the subject as if discovering it anew
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Rolling Stone
Schindler's List, despite blatant compromises, is a rending historical document. But the film's near-certain victory is based less on merit than on the marketing of its ambitious intentions. The academy doesn't judge movies, it weighs them by subject matter. On that basis, Spielberg's epic tips the scales.
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Roger Ebert
What is most amazing about this film is how completely Spielberg serves his story. The movie is brilliantly acted, written, directed and seen. Individual scenes are masterpieces of art direction, cinematography, special effects, crowd control.
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Empire Magazine
Overall this film is truly a triumph, its greatness being revealed in its tiny moments - the close-up of a swastika badge that introduces Neeson or the bungled defiance of Fiennes at his hanging.
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