Schindler's List

Although Spielberg had attempted to tackle weightier material in The Color Purple (1985), famously snubbed at the Oscars, and Empire Of The Sun, which saw a young Christian Bale in the starring role, the results had been met with mixed reactions. The news that he was making a film about the Holocaust, based on Thomas Keneally’s book, was therefore met with cautious enthusiasm. However, on release it was immediately recognised as a triumph, one that stands today as one of the most humane yet necessarily horrifying attempts to depict with verisimilitude this incomprehensible atrocity on film.

Liam Neeson stars as Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who uses his business to employ Jewish workers as essential to the war effort, keeping them from the concentration camps, the closest of which is overseen by Amon Göth (a truly chilling Ralph Fiennes).