Review: The Post (2017)

* * * 1/2
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks

The Post is not a movie that will surprise you, but there's pleasure to be had in a classic tale told in a classic fashion. Is it accurate to the way things actually happened? I'm sure the New York Times would have something to say about that, and in the end I'm not sure that it matters, unless you want to split hairs over whether plot or theme represent what a film is truly about. What it tells is a well crafted story, one which is engrossing and often rousing, and which has been fashioned in a way to make it as relevant to the moment that we're currently living in as possible, even as it hits all of the expected beats. It leads with its talent - which is, of course, considerable both off screen and on, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks - and lets that do most of the work. After all, how wrong could a movie with that triumvirate go? I'd say it doesn't really go wrong at all.

Review: Bridge of Spies (2015)

* * * 1/2
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Tom Hanks

It's easy to have ideals when they aren't being challenged; it's more difficult when you have to choose whether to hold firm to those ideals even when they could achieve an undesirable outcome, or see the integrity of those ideals reduced in order ensure a favorable outcome through manipulation. Bridge of Spies is about an idealistic man who believes so firmly in what he values that he's willing to expose himself to public ridicule to stand up for it, and is willing to go a few steps further than that, too. He's the kind of character that would have been played by Spencer Tracy or James Stewart in a different era, and could only be played in this one by Tom Hanks. As played by Hanks, he's a hero without being a moralizing one, and as directed by Steven Spielberg the film is a well crafted machine that seamlessly blends the courtroom drama with the spy thriller without making it feel like two different stories shoved together.

Review: Minority Report (2002)

* * * 1/2
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Tom Cruise, Samantha Morton, Colin Farrell

People don't seem to talk about Minority Report that much these days (though that may change when the TV series premieres this fall), which is odd because, aside from being a really good science fiction/action film, it's also a high point in star Tom Cruise's career since the 20th century gave way to the 21st (I'd say it's a high point in director Steven Spielberg's 21st century career, too, except that Lincoln, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Catch Me If You Can and War Horse are among the 10 films he's directed since 2000, so Minority Report falls more in the middle of his output). I hadn't seen Minority Report in years before sitting down to watch it recently, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it has held up, the soft ending aside. It's a film very much worth revisiting.

Review: Lincoln (2012)

* * * 1/2
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field

A film like Lincoln inevitably ends up being caught in a Catch-22. On the one hand, a story this important and compelling must be told. On the other, it's impossible to tell it without it having that aura of the "Important Story," which makes it feel like the kind of movie you see because it's "good for you," the cinematic equivalent of brussel sprouts. Lincoln is an "Important Story" - it just is, there's no fighting that - but it is told with a minimum of period piece fussiness and it takes material that might otherwise be dry and makes it engaging and even entertaining. Lincoln is a movie that is good for you, but it is also a good movie.

Review: The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

* * *
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig

Although I didn't really take much notice when The Adventures of Tintin was released theatrically (that will happen when a film is released directly in the middle of Oscar season madness), it would appear that it was a somewhat polarizing. Loved by many critics and recognized by many awarding bodies, the film was all but shut out by the Academy, gaining a Best Score nomination but not even showing up in the Animated Feature category. It was a huge success overseas but had a somewhat lacklustre domestic box office ("lacklustre" given the director, the fact that it was 3D, and it's family friendliness) and just generally seems to have been met with a bit of an "eh." It's a bit of a shame because, while I don't think the film is by any means a masterpiece, it's a fun and very ambitious movie.

Review: War Horse (2011)

* * * *
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson, Peter Mullan

Steven Spielberg gets criticized a lot for being overly sentimental, for taking films that are great and then adding that extra brush stroke that makes it one too many, marring what might otherwise be an unqualified masterpiece. Much of the time I agree with that criticism - he has several movies that would be perfect if only he trusted the audience enough and didn't feel the need to so overtly manipulate emotions - however, sentiment, when done properly, does have a place in cinema and War Horse, while not necessarily perfect, stays on the right side of the line between feeling and treacle.

The Best Picture Countdown #66: Schindler's List (1993)

Note: this post is modified from a previously published post

Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley

Schindler’s List is one of the heaviest films ever made, weighed down with an inescapable sense of grief, anger and regret, but ending on a note of bitter-sweet triumph. If you can make it to the end of the film, when it transitions from narrative fiction to documentary, without crying, I commend you on your willpower. Personally, I can’t even think about it without my eyes misting up. This isn’t just a good movie, but an important one. It is unflinching and powerful as it puts names and faces to the Holocaust, a word that is itself massive with meaning and something of which it is easy to think in monolithic terms, rather than in terms of individual people.

The film follows Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), who plays at being a Nazi collaborator in order to hide the fact that he’s saving Jews from the Nazi killing machine. However, Schindler is no cardboard hero. His primary motivation at the beginning is to make money where he sees an opportunity. It is only later, as he has gotten to know some of the Jews working for him, particularly Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), that his motivation shifts to saving lives. He plays a cat-and-mouse game with the Nazis, pretending to be loyal, pretending to be doing work for them, when in actuality he’s working against them. “If this factory ever produces a shell that can actually be fired, I’ll be very unhappy,” he tells Stern.

In contrast to Oskar, the film produces Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), a sadistic SS officer who kills the inmates of Auschwitz randomly, in one scene firing at them with a rifle from a balcony. There are moments when he seems almost human, when the common thread of humanity seems not to have been cut from him, but these moments are brief and, snapping back from them, he becomes worse than he was before. Take, for instance, a scene between him and Helen (Embeth Davidtz), one of the women in the camp. “I would like to reach out to you and touch you in your loneliness,” he says, carrying on in a way that makes it clear that there is conflict between his attraction to her and his Nazi ideals, before finally concluding with, “No, I don’t think so. You Jewish bitch, you nearly talked me into it, didn’t you?” Goeth is a point of reference, a way of understanding how something like this could ever have happened. Whatever good ever existed in him is buried under so much hate - some of it natural, some of it incited and inflamed by vile ideology - that it will never see the light of day again, and his hate is expressed in random, unpredictable ways. “There are no set rules you can live by, you cannot say to yourself ‘If I follow these rules, I will be safe,’” Helen tells Schindler of Goeth. He hurts not as punishment, but for the sake of hurting, because he has been granted that power.

But if Goeth is a character of condemnation, so too is Schindler, in a way. What is condemned through Schindler is not the sadism of Nazi ideology, but the failure to dismantle it before millions of innocent people could be murdered. If Schindler – one man – could save eleven hundred people from death while working right under the nose of the Nazi party, imagine how many could have been saved had there been ten more like him, one hundred, an entire nation, the entire world. The character of Schindler is a condemnation of the wilful ignorance of the rest of the world with regards to the Holocaust. The girl in the red coat provides the same function. The red of her coat symbolizes not just the blood of the Jewish people but also the voluntary blindfolds donned by the rest of the world. In a black and white film, the red coat stands out, it is unmistakeable, just as the rounding up of Jews in nations under Nazi rule was unmistakeable, was known, and was ignored.

Schindler's List is a memorial for those lost in the Holocaust, but its impact isn't merely emotional. Laying aside the story, this is a very strong film on a purely technical level. Shooting in a documentary style, Steven Spielberg deliberately limited what he brought in his director’s bag of tricks. There are no crane shots here, no zooms; it is shot in a simple style, largely with handheld cameras. In doing this, Spielberg gives the film the intimacy necessary to really tell this story. His stripped-down direction is aided in no small part by the cinematography of Janusz Kaminski and the score by John Williams and Itzhak Perlman. This isn’t a flashy, bombastic film, and it doesn’t need to be. Spielberg’s knowledge of and trust in that is one of the film’s greatest assets.

Schindler’s List will break your heart, but it will also lift your spirit. In the final moments, a title card informs us: “There are fewer than 4000 Jews left alive in Poland today. There are more than 6000 descendants of the Schindler Jews.” 6000. Amazing what one person can do.

Review: Munich (2005)

* * * 1/2
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Geoffrey Rush

"You'll do what the terrorists do." Any doubt you might have had regarding the position the film would take to the story of the Israeli government's retaliation against the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics is pretty much set to rest in that one line, spoken by a Mossad official. That position made Munich controversial in certain circles when it was released, but the questions it raises shouldn't be ignored.

The film begins with the events at Munich, when members of the Palestinian militant group Black September took 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage in an attempt to force Israel to release 234 "political prisoners." The scene at Munich is pure chaos and results in all the athletes and most of the terrorists being killed. The film does not elaborate a great deal on the events at Munich, but rather allows it to haunt the periphery of the story (for a more comprehensive discussion of just what a gong show the whole thing was I recommend Kevin Macdonald's documentary One Day in September), helping to drive the protagonist towards madness through frequent flashbacks. There is a sense of obligation for him to avenge those lost men that never goes away or lessens no matter how his feelings about his revenge mission start to change.

That man is Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana), the leader of a top secret squad of Israeli assassins out to kill 11 men connected to Black September. His team includes Steve (Daniel Craig), Hans (Hans Zischler), Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz) and Carl (Ciaran Hinds), and in Paris he makes contact with Louis (Mathieu Amalric), an informant who puts him on the track of the men they're hunting. With the first few targets Avner is more or less content to accept the government's word that these are justified killings, but as time goes on he begins to question that and to ask for proof. He also becomes angry as he realizes that they're killing terrorists only to have them be replaced by worse terrorists. This isn't a solution after all, it's just an escalation.

Given the politically fraught subject matter, Munich makes for a provocative film and director Steven Spielberg (working from a screenplay by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth) doesn't shy away from the big questions or from taking a solid stance. It's important to Avner that he only kill people directly involved with Black September and not collect any collateral damage (though this become less of an issue for him as time goes on). On one mission he realizes that the daughter of one of the targets has gone back to the house and he rushes to stop the bomb from being detonated so that she won't be killed. Since the film is from the same director who brought us Schindler's List, it can't be meaningless that the little girl is wearing a red sweater in this scene. Blood for blood is still blood, murder for murder is still murder.

Spielberg tells the story in an efficient and engrossing way. The scenes in which the team carries out its assassinations (and attempted assassinations) are incredibly well-crafted, Spielberg at the absolute top of his game. The ending is a bit limp compared to what comes before and that's really the only issue that I have with the film (well, that and the fact that I think Marie-Josée Croze is wasted in a minor role). Bana, who has never really made much of an impression on me, delivers a great performance that expertly navigates the moral dilemma and competing emotions and loyalties that Avner is facing. Overall this is a very strong effort from one of our greatest living filmmakers.

Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

* * *
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf

Some things I learned from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:

1. You can survive a nuclear explosion by taking refuge in a lead refrigerator;
2. The ruins of South America are filled with indigenous peoples of various stripes just waiting for a nosy gringo to come by so that they can jump out at him;
3. The next big attraction at Disneyland is going to be a water ride involving a drop off of three consecutive waterfalls

The latest instalment in the Indiana Jones series is kind of silly but it’s also pretty entertaining as long as you’re willing to embrace the silliness. It’s no Raiders of the Lost Ark to be sure, but what is? Crystal Skull is a pleasant addition to the series, one that doesn’t take itself too seriously and is full of great action sequences. It nods to the original in various ways, most notably through the return of Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood (yay!), who proves that there’s something to be said for actresses aging naturally and gracefully, and a brief glimpse of the Ark of the Covenant at the beginning of the film when Indy is forced to help some KGB, led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), in their search through an army warehouse. It also effectively passes the torch from Harrison Ford to Shia LaBeouf, laying the groundwork for an Indy-free adventure next time.

The story takes place in 1957, when Mutt Williams (LaBeouf) tracks Indy down after his mother (Marion) and father-figure Professor Oxley (John Hurt) have been kidnapped in Peru. Indy and Mutt head down after them and begin to uncover the secrets of the Crystal Skull – secrets which Irina would very much like to harness as part of a KGB plot to control the minds of the world. Indy and Mutt are eventually reunited with Marion and Oxley, leading to various escapes, recaptures, and chase scenes which will culminate in an ending that will leave you sighing in exasperation or simply shrugging and continuing to go with the flow.

There’s a lot that I liked about the film, not least of which is that it’s just a lot of fun – fun not only to watch but, by the looks of it, fun to make as well (Indy’s reunion with Marion looks genuinely joyful, as do all their subsequent interactions). It’s a little heavier on CGI than I would have liked, and there are moments that are a tad gruesome (Indy can be afraid of snakes all he wants but my biggest worry will now be ants) and some which are just plain ridiculous (Mutt swinging through the jungle with a band of monkeys), but so what? I didn’t go to this movie thinking that it would be some grand revelation about the art of filmmaking; I went to be entertained and I was. Harrison Ford is an actor I like a lot and it’s nice that he’s in a movie that I actually want to see after damn near a decade of making films you couldn’t get me anywhere near if you had a gun to my head.

This may not be a movie that will hold up a decade from now and it’s never going to become a revered classic in the style of Raiders, but it’s a very entertaining film and definitely worth the price of admission. Besides, how can you help yourself from smiling when you hear that theme music and see that fedora for the first time? Watching this movie is kind of like putting on a comfortable old sweater. It just feels good.

100 Days, 100 Movies: E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Henry Thomas, Drew Barrymore, Robert McNaughton

Maybe it was a simpler time, a time when a science-fiction blockbuster could be about an alien that wasn’t trying to destroy us. Maybe the world wasn't such a scary place and we didn't need to fear the unknown. Whatever the reason, whatever the attitudes which shaped E.T. and made it a hit, we should be grateful for the fact that it exists, because it isn’t just a movie. It’s a story that transcends boundaries of gender and age and genre, a story that comes from – and goes straight to – the heart. It’s a story about outsiders and belonging and, ultimately, finding “home.”

E.T. begins with an alien expedition to earth. When it is completed, and the aliens depart, one is left behind and eventually finds his way to Elliot (Henry Thomas), who hides him and helps him try to find a way to get home. In many ways, it’s a straight-forward family film, featuring plenty of precocious kids (including Drew Barrymore as Gertie, the most precocious of precocious kids), and focusing on friendship and the movement from childhood innocence into more grown-up knowledge. But it’s also more than that.

By now most people are aware that the film is Steven Spielberg’s meditation on his own parents’ divorce, and you can see that in the story and through its two protagonists. Elliot and E.T. are essentially mirrors of each other. E.T. is stranded in a foreign place and seeks home, and Elliot, too, seeks home, albeit in a different sense. The lingering pain of divorce is evident in the early scenes of the film and further alienates Elliot – who as the middle child would already occupy a strange and uncertain place within the family structure – from the rest of his family. Home isn’t just a physical place; it’s a mental/spiritual concept. By helping E.T. find home and reunite with his family, Elliot is also reconciling himself to his own family, and finding a place of his own to call home.

Although it’s a science fiction film, its greatest strength isn’t in its effects (which isn’t to say that its special effects aren’t good), but in its performances, which is amazing since the central performances are by children and a puppet. Thomas, Barrymore and Robert McNaughton all deliver finely wrought performances, a testament no doubt to Spielberg’s ability to direct children. They don’t come across as kids playing an adult’s idea of what kids are; they simply seem like kids, and very relatable ones to members of the audience who are kids. Thomas, especially, is very good as he carries much of the weight of the film and never overplays it. If you can’t muster a tear for the scene where Elliot and ET say goodbye (“I’ll… be… right… here.”), then film just isn’t a medium capable of moving you.

Much was made a few years ago when Spielberg decided to tinker with E.T. like George Lucas did with Star Wars. I’ve never seen the “remastered” version (as with the aforementioned Star Wars, I’m strictly old school when it comes to this film), but my understanding from people who have seen it is that the improvements simply… aren’t. Most seem to agree that efforts to CGI E.T. into looking more “realistic” have only had the opposite effect. As I said, I haven’t see it so I can’t really attest to that, but I can well imagine that that’s true because I generally find that CGI, which is meant to make things look more natural and organic, just makes everything look fake. I can however offer my opinion that Spielberg’s decision to remove the guns from the hands of government agents was a wasted effort, although I believe that his heart was in the right place. I saw E.T. a number of times as a kid and I don’t ever remember fixating on the guns but I do remember having nightmares about the scenes where the house is locked down by the government. I think any kid who can get past that probably isn’t going to be traumatized by the guns. I don’t know how difficult it is now to find the original, unremastered version of E.T., but I think it would be worth the effort of tracking down for anyone who has never seen it. It is, simply, a really great movie.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Jaws (1975)

Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw

It was only about a year ago that I saw Jaws for the first time. I had never gone out of my way to see it before because I was under the impression that it was just a routine action thriller, albeit the one that began the trend of summer blockbusters. Happening across it on TCM last summer, I decided to watch and found myself completely engrossed. There is nothing “routine” about this movie, and if more “blockbuster” wannabe films styled themselves after Jaws, they wouldn’t come and go so quickly from the collective imagination.

Police Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) has moved with his family from New York to the island of Amity, a place his wife thinks will be a safer environment to raise their two kids. The mangled body of a woman is found on a beach, a victim of a shark. The Mayor, and other locals concerned about the impact that news of a shark attack would have on tourism, conspire to cover this up, and Brody reluctantly goes along with it until the shark returns to claim more victims. He then teams up with Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Quint (Robert Shaw), a shark expert and shark hunter, respectively, to kill the shark, a creature that proves to be more difficult to kill than most movie monsters.

By now everyone has heard the anecdotes about the mechanical shark that wouldn’t work, necessitating a limited visual presence in the film. This turned out to be a good thing, of course, because it lets the audience build up the shark in its imagination, and even though we don’t actually see the shark until the final third of the film (though we do see it’s massive shadow underneath the water), it’s presence looms large over the entire narrative. What we do see of the shark is pretty spectacular (and prompts the film’s most famous line: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat”), especially when it literally takes apart the ridiculously inadequate Orca piece by piece.

However, the sequences of high action are only a small part of why Jaws works. This film is effective because it spends most of its running time letting us get to know its characters and then puts them in the middle of nowhere up against a shark bigger than their boat. There are lots of little moments that allow us to feel for these characters, to like them enough so that we actually care in the end whether they live or die. There is a moment early in the film, after Brody has had an especially bad day, when he sits at the dinner table and notices that his younger son is imitating his gestures and expressions. There is also the scene in the Orca where Brody and Hooper listen as Quint tells them about being a survivor of the USS Indianapolis – one of the great movie speeches. Scenes like these are cut out of most blockbuster style movies, where the story is more or less just a means of connecting one explosion to another. But these scenes add incalculably to the film because they ground the characters firmly in the audience’s reality and we see them as people instead of characters who have the superhuman ability to withstand just about anything.

Jaws also has in its favour a pretty good sense of humour and moments of comedy that seem to arise organically out the story, rather than being tacked on for the sake of ironic catch-phrases. Most of the comedic moments come courtesy of Hooper, but my favourite comes down to Brody. Hooper drops by the Brodys’ house with a bottle of wine and Brody pours about half the bottle into his own glass while his wife and Hooper watch with bemusement. They then have a conversation which includes the following exchange:

    Ellen: “Martin hates water. Martin sits in his car when we go on the ferry to     the mainland. I guess it’s a childhood thing. It’s a… there’s a clinical name     for it isn’t there?”
    Brody: “Drowning.”

Hooper then takes Brody off on an unofficial exploration mission in which we get more scenes of drunk, snarky Brody before he quickly sobers up at proof that the shark that has been caught and killed is not the same shark that’s been attacking people.

Jaws is a movie that does everything right in order to accomplish it’s goal. It’s a movie that knows that the audiences needs someone in the film to connect with in order to care whether or not the villain is defeated and whether or not the action sequences result in death. It doesn’t rush through the steps of character establishment in order to get to the “good stuff,” but instead takes its time and lets it characters breathe a little. It’s an action movie that is anything but routine.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Schindler's List (1993)

Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley

Schindler’s List is one of the heaviest films ever made, weighed down with an inescapable sense of grief, anger and regret, but ending on a note of bitter-sweet triumph. If you can make it to the end of the film, when it transitions from narrative fiction to documentary, without crying, I commend you on your willpower. Personally, I can’t even think about it without my eyes misting up. This isn’t just a good movie, but an important one. It is unflinching and powerful as it puts names and faces to the Holocaust, a word that is itself massive with meaning and something of which it is easy to think in monolithic terms, rather than in terms of individual people.

The film follows Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), who plays at being a Nazi collaborator in order to hide the fact that he’s saving Jews from the Nazi killing machine. However, Schindler is no cardboard hero. His primary motivation at the beginning is to make money where he sees an opportunity. It is only later, as he has gotten to know some of the Jews working for him, particularly Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), that his motivation shifts to saving lives. He plays a cat-and-mouse game with the Nazis, pretending to be loyal, pretending to be doing work for them, when in actuality he’s working against them. “If this factory ever produces a shell that can actually be fired, I’ll be very unhappy,” he tells Stern.

In contrast to Oskar, the film produces Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), a sadistic SS officer who kills the inmates of Auschwitz randomly, in one scene firing at them with a rifle from a balcony. There are moments when he seems almost human, when the common thread of humanity seems not to have been cut from him, but these moments are brief and, snapping back from them, he becomes worse than he was before. Take, for instance, a scene between him and Helen (Embeth Davidtz), one of the women in the camp. “I would like to reach out to you and touch you in your loneliness,” he says, carrying on in a way that it’s clear there is conflict between his attraction to her and his Nazi ideals, before finally concluding with, “No, I don’t think so. You Jewish bitch, you nearly talked me into it, didn’t you?” Goeth is a point of reference, a way of understanding how something like this could ever have happened. Whatever good ever existed in him is buried under so much hate - some of it natural, some of it incited and inflamed by vile ideology - that it will never see the light of day again, and his hate is expressed in random, unpredictable ways. “There are no set rules you can live by, you cannot say to yourself ‘If I follow these rules, I will be safe,’” Helen tells Schindler of Goeth. He hurts not as punishment, but for the sake of hurting, because he has been granted that power.

But if Goeth is a character of condemnation, so too is Schindler, in a way. What is condemned through Schindler is not the sadism of Nazi ideology, but the failure to dismantle it before millions of innocent people could be murdered. If Schindler – one man – could save eleven hundred people from death while working right under the nose of the Nazi party, imagine how many could have been saved had there been ten more like him, one hundred, an entire nation, the entire world. The character of Schindler is a condemnation of the wilful ignorance of the rest of the world with regards to the Holocaust. The girl in the red coat provides the same function. The red of her coat symbolizes not just the blood of the Jewish people but also the voluntary blindfolds donned by the rest of the world. In a black and white film, the red coat stands out, it is unmistakeable, just as the rounding up of Jews in nations under Nazi rule was unmistakeable, was known, and was ignored.

Schindler's List is a memorial for those lost in the Holocaust, but its impact isn't merely emotional. Laying aside the story, this is a very strong film on a purely technical level. Shooting in a documentary style, Steven Spielberg deliberately limited what he brought in his director’s bag of tricks. There are no crane shots here, no zooms; it is shot in a simple style, largely with handheld cameras. In doing this, Spielberg gives the film the intimacy necessary to really tell this story. His stripped-down direction is aided in no small part by the cinematography of Janusz Kaminski and the score by John Williams and Itzhak Perlman. This isn’t a flashy, bombastic film, and it doesn’t need to be. Spielberg’s knowledge of and trust in that is one of the film’s greatest assets.

Schindler’s List will break your heart, but it will also lift your spirit. In the final moments, a title card informs us: “There are fewer than 4000 Jews left alive in Poland today. There are more than 6000 descendants of the Schindler Jews.” 6000. Amazing what one person can do.