Schindler's List

Oscar™ Best Picture - Winning Movies

8.7

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Original title: Schindler's List
Year: 1993
Running time: 195 min.
Country: United States
Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenwriter: Steven Zaillian (Novel: Thomas Keneally)
Music: John Williams
Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski (B&W)
Cast: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall, Jonathan Sagall, Embeth Davidtz, Norbert Weisser, Martin S. Bergmann, Mark Ivanir, Malgorzata Gebel, Shmuel Levy, Michael Schneider, Joachim Paul Assböck, Branko Lustig, Götz Otto
Producer: Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment
Genre: Drama | Nazism. Holocaust. Based On A True Story. II World War
Synopsis / Plot: Oskar Schindler is a German businessman in Poland who sees an opportunity to make money from the Nazis' rise to power. He starts a company to make cookware and utensils, using flattery and bribes to win military contracts, and brings in accountant and financier Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) to help run the factory. By staffing his plant with Jews who've been herded into Krakow's ghetto by Nazi troops, Schindler has a dependable unpaid labor force. For Stern, a job in a war-related plant could mean survival for himself and the other Jews working for Schindler. However, in 1942, all of Krakow's Jews are assigned to the Plaszow Forced Labor Camp, overseen by Commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), an embittered alcoholic who occasionally shoots prisoners from his balcony. Schindler arranges to continue using Polish Jews in his plant, but, as he sees what is happening to his employees, he begins to develop a conscience. He realizes that his factory (now refitted to manufacture ammunition) is the only thing preventing his staff from being shipped to the death camps. Soon Schindler demands more workers and starts bribing Nazi leaders to keep Jews on his employee lists and out of the camps. By the time Germany falls to the allies, Schindler has lost his entire fortune — and saved 1,100 people from likely death.

Awards: 1993: 7 Academy Awards: Best Movie, Director, Screenplay, Editing, Music, Art Direction, Cinematography

1993: 3 Golden Globes: Movie: Drama, Screenplay, Director. 6 Nominations

1993: 7 BAFTA Awards, including Best Director, Film and OST. 13 Nominations

1994: Cesar Awards: Nominated for Best Foreign Language Picture

1993: National Board of Review: Best Movie

1993: 3 Awards Film Critics Circle of New York, inc. Supporting Actor (Fiennes)

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1993: 6 Chicago Film Critics Association Awards, including best Picture

1993: Producers Guild Awards (PGA): Best Film

1993: Directors Guild of America (DGA): Best Director

1993: Writers Guild of America (WGA): Best Adapted Screenplay

Critics' reviews

"'Schindler's List' is a film whose meanings are to be found less in its uplifting outline than in its harrowing flow of images -- images of fear, hope, horror, compassion, degradation, chaos, and death"

Owen Gleiberman: Entertainment Weekly
"Rising brilliantly to the challenge of this material and displaying an electrifying creative intelligence, Mr. Spielberg has made sure that neither he nor the Holocaust will ever be thought of in the same way again"

Janet Maslin: The New York Times
"What is most amazing about this film is how completely Spielberg serves his story. The movie is brilliantly acted, written, directed and seen (...) Rating: ★★★★ (out of four)"

Roger Ebert: Chicago Sun-Times
"Schindler's List, despite blatant compromises, is a rending historical document"

Peter Travers: Rolling Stone
"A remarkable work by any standard (...) evinces an artistic rigor and unsentimental intelligence unlike anything the world’s most successful filmmaker has demonstrated before."

Todd McCarthy: Variety
"Spielberg gives us Schindler's story with such conviction and urgency, such overwhelming visual sweep and force, that he keeps us virtually mesmerized for three hours."

Michael Wilmington: Chicago Tribune
"The film’s long middle section, which describes the working of the death camps, is concrete and utterly terrifying, certainly the most intense and uncompromising depiction of the Nazi horror ever to appear in a fiction film."

Dave Kehr: New York Daily News
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