Schindler's List (1993)

Emotionally powerful and historically very important. This film deals with possibly the hardest topic in human history, and it does it with class, purpose and excellent filmmaking. Liam Neeson is brilliant as Schindler; Fiennes is utterly horrifying as the terrible Goth and all the other character actors hit the mark brilliantly. The decision to make it black and white makes Schindler's List stand-out and feel distinct, it is a piece of genius. In the end this film is about the utter depravity that humanity is capable of, and the utterly brilliant…

There's a powerful little low-budget effort with Ralph Richardson called "The Silver Fleet" (1943) that illustrates just how difficult it was for those in the occupied territories to continue to do what was right without looking like a collaborator and/or ending up against a wall of Nazi bullets. Well here, Steven Spielberg takes that dangerous occupation and scales it up somewhat as the eponymous Czech industrialist and arms manufacturer (Liam Neeson) finds his increasing revulsion to the brutality of their new occupying power driving him, with the…

I don't know how I feel about this anymore. When it first came out I loved it. I thought it was a great film, but I was 13 and it played on my love for history. Now watching it, it's well done, direction wise I like it. But Mel Brooks did a better job with B&W lighting in Young Frankenstein. I know photography, I know film, and a lot of it I wouldn't have done that way. I wouldn't have done it that way and they are really simple lighting and contrast fixes. Some just comes down to a filter. And then Ralph Fiennes, you hated him in the movie, but you…