In 1993, Steven Spielberg rocked Hollywood with an incredible one-two. He cemented his rep as the industry's ultimate popcorn-pusher and then banished it forever with a shattering, tear-stained masterpiece of Holocaust horror. CG dinosaurs made Jurassic Park the most successful movie of all time. But after Schindler's List, it was Spielberg, seemingly, whonow ruled the Earth.

So as a patented Oscar-hoover, Spielberg's List was a no-brainer, earning the beardy filmmaker his much-lusted-after Best Director statuette. But in crafting the incredible story of Oskar Schindler - the German entrepreneur who saved more than 1,200 Jews from the Nazi gas chambers by giving them jobs in his factory in Poland - the 'Berg battled off his reptilian impulses towards compromise and calculation. Certainly, melodrama seeps though and history has been blurred (our little red riding hood; Schindler's crowd-pleasing, climactic breakdown...), but what remains shockingly clear is the indelible fusion of Spielberg's genius for humanist storytelling and the horrified, unblinking realism of his Holocaust depiction.

Filming on many of the locations where the events of Thomas Keneally's biog-book Schindler's Ark took place, Spielberg lights up history's nightmare in vivid black-and-white: gut-wrenching docu-verité camerawork captures the stricken panic of the Jews as they're harried and slaughtered, while the Nazis are lensed against a sheen of beautiful Expressionist movie-gloss. And, colliding in a subtle flipside character-composition, Spielberg's two acting totems back him with remarkable performances. Ralph Fiennes, as the monstrous Commandant Amon Goeth who uses Jews for target practise, embodies the bloated banality of evil. Liam Neeson, meanwhile, is magnificent in the lead, protecting Schindler's enigma (playboy, profiteer, saint) to the last. Schindler's List is as it will remain: profoundly moving, profoundly shocking, profoundly important.

DVD Extras:

"Making Schindler's List not only deepened my faith, but changed the course of my life. I came to understand how one person can make a difference." Steven Spielberg there, gushing it up in the introduction to this long-awaited, two-disc DVD edition of his most acclaimed work. Lovely sentiments, and they would have rung rather more true if Stevey had included: a) a commentary; or b) well, anything at all about the making of Schindler's List. As it is, we have neither in a presentation that even splits the film across the two discs. Most irksome.What we do get, then, are two featurettes and a text biography of Oskar Schindler. The Shoah Foundation Story With Steven Spielberg is a short summary of the Beard's post-List efforts to collect and collate all the remaining testimonies of the world's Holocaust survivors. With Morgan Freeman doing his best Shawshank voiceover, we see how Spielberg's team recordedfirst-hand experiences from people across the world before digitally cataloguing them to create a visual history to educate the children of the future. Worthy stuff, indeed. The biggie, though, is Voices From The List, a 77-minute documentary in which members of the Survivors Of The Shoah Visual History Foundation relive the Holocaust experience from beginning to end. The simplicity of form (talking heads intercut with vintage photos and footage) gives an affecting vision of the reality, and the fear and disbelief at what was happening (an escapee from one of the first concentration camps was disbelieved by the Jewish elders when he told them what was happening) give way to some shocking accounts. The terrible, ash-doused camps ("It was then that we realised that nothing would really save us"), children being carted away, their screaming mothers shot while lullabies played over loudspeakers... It makes for a powerful insight into a tragedy beyond our comprehension. Just a shame that it's a lonely bonus on this otherwise disappointing release.