Schindler's List

Chicago Tribune Gene Siskel

What is surprising is how well Spielberg captures the horror, moving his camera with the fury of a combat photographer on the run. [17 Dec 1993]

Film.com John Hartl

The other key part is Schindler's Jewish accountant, played with self-effacing brilliance by Ben Kingsley, who gives the movie just the touch of warmth and sanity it needs.

TV Guide Staff (Not Credited)

Director Steven Spielberg has achieved something close to the impossible--a morally serious, aesthetically stunning historical epic that is nonetheless readily accessible to a mass audience.

Chicago Sun-Times 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.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Spielberg restages the Holocaust with an existential vividness unprecedented in any nondocumentary film: He makes us feel as if we're living right inside the 20th century's darkest-and most defining-episode.

Time Staff (Not Credited)

Epic cinema, tragic drama, it is also an act of remembrance and conscience that ultimately transcends the ordinary critical categories.

Variety Staff (Not Credited)

Evinces an artistic rigor and unsentimental intelligence unlike anything the world's most successful filmmaker has demonstrated before.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

And Ben Kingsley--O rare Ben Kingsley!--is the Jewish accountant whom Schindler plucks from a condemned group to run his business and who combines gratitude with disdain, subservience with pride. (Actors who want to study the basis of acting--concentration--should watch Kingsley.) [13 Dec 1993]

San Francisco Chronicle Peter Stack

By any measure, the horrifying yet powerfully uplifting Schindler's List from director Steven Spielberg is a milestone in the art of filmmaking. [15 Dec 1993]

USA Today Mike Clark

With flawless precision, the movie flows seamlessly between a virtual newsreel approach (to chronicle senseless, arbitrary atrocities on the people) and a slightly more direct narrative technique that characterized the film's three dominant characters - each one cast to perfection. [15 Dec 1993]

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Because this film touches us so deeply, the catharsis has a power that few -- if any -- other moments in film history can match. And that's what establishes this as a transcendent motion picture experience.

The New York Times Elvis Mitchell

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. [15 Dec 1993]

Empire Kim Newman

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.

The New Yorker Terrence Rafferty

Few American movies since the silent era have had anything approaching this picture's narrative boldness, visual audacity, and emotional directness. [20 Dec 1993, p.129]

Wall Street Journal Julie Salamon

A movie that falls outside the ordinary, or even the extraordinary. There is enormous passion and artistic integrity throughout this film. [11 Jan 1994, p.A10(E)]

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Quietly devastating. [15 Dec 1993]

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

The movie's ending at the train station and the modern-day epilogue feel protracted and indulgent...Apart from the ending though, this is Spielberg's most articulate movie ever.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

True, traces of his bad habits show through at certain moments, especially near the end, when a long and lachrymose scene plunges into Spielgerian sentimentality of the gooiest kind. But before that unfortunate point, Schinder's List serves up three full hours of brilliant storytelling. That's as humane and compassionate as it is gripping and provocative. [15 Dec 1993]

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

A powerful and affecting piece of work.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

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.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Spielberg does an uncommonly good job both of holding our interest over 185 minutes and of showing more of the nuts and bolts of the Holocaust than we usually get from fiction films. Despite some characteristic simplifications, he's generally scrupulous about both his source and the historical record.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

This heavy-hitting fist lands with calculated deliberation. Despite Spielberg's obviously genuine commitment, "Schindler's List" feels strangely controlled -- more than impassioned. It's officially artistic, an engineered project of pride, Little Stevie's growing-up project, rather than an organically brilliant masterpiece.

Washington Post Rita Kempley

A ruthlessly unsentimental portrait of a German war profiteer's epiphany that inspires neither sorrow nor pity, but a kind of emotional numbness.