"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. Yet Spielberg, the stylist whose films often have gloried in shots we are intended to notice and remember, disappears into his work. Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes and the other actors are devoid of acting flourishes. There is a single-mindedness to the enterprise that is awesome." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Donald R. Mott, Film Reference
The initial skepticism surrounding Steven Spielberg's directorial undertaking quickly dissipated when Schindler's List , an alarmingly powerful and affecting tale of an unlikely German-Czech industrialist who manages to save 1100 Jews from the Nazi death camps, hit theater screens late in 1993 during the holiday season. In March of the following year, Spielberg won an Academy Award for "Best Director" and Schindler's List went on to win "Best Picture." But the climb to capture the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' most prestigious awards—had been a long and arduous one for the "wunderkind" filmmaker, whose films to date have made him the most successful financial filmmaker of all time.
It is not as though Spielberg hadn't tried to capture this top Oscar before, especially when he turned to directing serious dramas like The Color Purple (1984) and Empire of the Sun (1987), both of which were based on novels.
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Schindler's List was unusual in that the controversial hero was both a German Christian and Nazi sympathizer whose life before and after the war remained relatively uneventful, further complicating the real reasons why Schindler risked his life and newfound wealth for his doomed Jewish employees. Liam Neeson is quoted in a Time article by Richard Corless as saying, "I still don't know what made him save all those lives. He was a man everybody liked. And he liked to be liked; he was a wonderful kisser of ass. Perhaps he was inspired to do some great piece of work. I like to think—and maybe it comes across in the film—that he needed to be needed."....What unfolds on the screen for the next three and a quarter hours is a striking portrait of a most unusual man undertaking the most frightening risks imaginable amid the sheer terror, brutality and ugliness of the Nazi war machine.
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After several attempts at making a fully realized, mature film, Steven Spielberg finally put it all together in “Schindler’s List.” A remarkable work by any standard, this searing historical and biographical drama, about a Nazi industrialist who saved some 1,100 Jews from certain death in the concentration camps, evinced an artistic rigor and unsentimental intelligence he had demonstrated before. Marked by a brilliant screenplay, exceptionally supple technique, three staggeringly good lead performances and an attitude toward the traumatic subject matter that was both passionately felt and impressively restrained, this was the film that won over Spielberg skeptics
