Steven Spielberg's (mostly) black-and-white, three-and-a-third-hour Holocaust film. And the nearest thing to a feel-good Holocaust film that a Holocaust film can be. (The real-life hero -- a gentile businessman who spared over a thousand Jews by keeping them employed in his pots-and-pans plant -- is a reassuring figure for American audiences: a prosperous capitalist, a hedonist, partygoer, womanizer, but also a man of conscience when it comes to the crunch, a philanthropist, a samaritan, a savior. Someone, in sum, to identify with, without too much personal discomfort.) The photography throughout switches willy-nilly between a harsh, sooty, often overexposed documentary style, accompanied at times by a floaty, hand-held camera, and on the other hand a frilly, arty, chiaroscuro style partial to preciosity: oozing, dry-icy light; backlit cigarette smoke; out-of-focus raindrops that transform a car window into hobnail glass -- that kind of thing. The sensation is somewhat as if a novelist were to shift back and forth between the prose styles of Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Allan Poe. The contrasting styles proclaim, and loudly, nothing so much as an absence of style. Worse, an absence of vision. Spielberg has here put together a sort of portfolio of black-and-white, much as he put together a portfolio of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, a portfolio of ghosts in Poltergeist, a portfolio of perils in the Indiana Jones series. The linkage to special effects is not inapt. To Spielberg, black-and-white photography appears to be precisely that -- an effect, a fashion statement, a whole wardrobe of fashion statements. And on that point at least Schindler's List is not so distant from Jurassic Park as generally supposed. Much the same might be said about Spielberg's interest in the impact of bullets on innocent victims, particularly on their skulls: the geysers of blood, the firecracker-like eruptions of innards. He cannot cut himself off completely from the special-effects department. Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd