Steven Spielberg's impressive (although very long) and sometimes moving Oscar-winning account of the wartime exploits of the Austro-German businessman and profiteer who made a mint from a Polish pots-and-pans factory using Jewish labour he didn't have to pay - except in kind. To those Jews in the Krakow ghetto, though, work for Oskar Schindler was infinitely preferable to anything else. Concerned only with making money, he was a kind if sharp wheeler-dealer who treated staff fairly. Hobnobbing with the Germans, he bought Nazi friendship with money and black market goods, even beguiling the psychotic local commandant, Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), whose hobby was taking pot shots at passing Jews. But the high-living, womanising Schindler inevitably became drawn to the deprivations of his workforce. As the man who became an unlikely hero and the saviour of a race not his own, Neeson is excellent all the way through, only faltering in an out-of-character breakdown at the end, while Ralph Fiennes is icily sinister as the ruthless commandant. The direction is often fine - notably in the Auschwitz scenes when 300 Schindler Jews are mistakenly taken to the death camp - but sometimes a bit flashy, especially in the use of spot colour to highlight a flame or a girl's red coat: it seems intrusive and adds nothing.

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