Metacritic reviews

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

A powerful and affecting piece of work.

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.