93%  Winner:   Schindler's List  195 min,  R,  [Biography, Drama, History]  [Steven Spielberg]  [04 Feb 1994]
Ratings & Reviews:  IMDb Reviews: 89%,   Rotten Tomatoes: 97%,   Metacritic: 93%,   External Reviews
Awards:  Won 7 Oscars. Another 82 wins & 49 nominations.
Actors:  Ben Kingsley, Caroline Goodall, Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes
Writer:  Thomas Keneally (book), Steven Zaillian (screenplay)
External Links:  Rotten Tomatoes  IMDb  Website     Language:  English, Hebrew, German, Polish    Country:  USA
Plot:  Oskar Schindler is a vainglorious and greedy German businessman who becomes an unlikely humanitarian amid the barbaric German Nazi reign when he feels compelled to turn his factory into a refuge for Jews. Based on the true story of Oskar Schindler who managed to save about 1100 Jews from being gassed at the Auschwitz concentration camp, it is a testament to the good in all of us.
Rotten Tomatoes:   Based on a true story, Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List stars Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, a German businessman in Poland who sees an opportunity to make money from the Nazis' rise to power. He starts a company to make cookware and utensils, using flattery and bribes to win military contracts, and brings in accountant and financier Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) to help run the factory. By staffing his plant with Jews who've been herded into Krakow's ghetto by Nazi troops, Schindler has a dependable unpaid labor force. For Stern, a job in a war-related plant could mean survival for himself and the other Jews working for Schindler. However, in 1942, all of Krakow's Jews are assigned to the Plaszow Forced Labor Camp, overseen by Commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), an embittered alcoholic who occasionally shoots prisoners from his balcony. Schindler arranges to continue using Polish Jews in his plant, but, as he sees what is happening to his employees, he begins to develop a conscience. He realizes that his factory (now refitted to manufacture ammunition) is the only thing preventing his staff from being shipped to the death camps. Soon Schindler demands more workers and starts bribing Nazi leaders to keep Jews on his employee lists and out of the camps. By the time Germany falls to the allies, Schindler has lost his entire fortune -- and saved 1,100 people from likely death. Schindler's List was nominated for 12 Academy Awards and won seven, including Best Picture and a long-coveted Best Director for Spielberg, and it quickly gained praise as one of the finest American movies about the Holocaust. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

86%  Nominee:   In the Name of the Father  133 min,  R,  [Biography, Drama]  [Jim Sheridan]  [25 Feb 1994]
Ratings & Reviews:  IMDb Reviews: 81%,   Rotten Tomatoes: 94%,   Metacritic: 84%,   External Reviews
Awards:  Nominated for 7 Oscars. Another 7 wins & 33 nominations.
Actors:  Alison Crosbie, Daniel Day-Lewis, Emma Thompson, Pete Postlethwaite, Philip King
Writer:  Gerry Conlon (autobiographical book "Proved Innocent"), Terry George (screenplay), Jim Sheridan (screenplay)
External Links:  Rotten Tomatoes  IMDb     Language:  English    Country:  Ireland, UK, USA
Plot:  A small time thief from Belfast, Gerry Conlon, is falsely implicated in the IRA bombing of a pub that kills several people while he is in London. Bullied by the British police, he and four of his friends are coerced into confessing their guilt. Gerry's father and other relatives in London are also implicated in the crime. He spends 15 years in prison with his father trying to prove his innocence with the help of a British attorney, Gareth Peirce. Based on a true story.
Rotten Tomatoes:   True story of Irish youth wrongly convicted for IRA bombing in 1974 as he and his father are taken to prison and forgotten. Powerful drama details their fight to survive in prison and to reveal the truth of their innocence.

87%  Nominee:   The Fugitive  130 min,  PG-13,  [Action, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller]  [Andrew Davis]  [06 Aug 1993]
Ratings & Reviews:  IMDb Reviews: 78%,   Rotten Tomatoes: 96%,   Metacritic: 87%,   External Reviews
Awards:  Won 1 Oscar. Another 11 wins & 33 nominations.
Actors:  Harrison Ford, Julianne Moore, Sela Ward, Tommy Lee Jones
Writer:  Jeb Stuart (screenplay), David Twohy (screenplay), David Twohy (story), Roy Huggins (characters)
External Links:  Wikipedia  Rotten Tomatoes  IMDb     Language:  English, Polish, Spanish    Country:  USA
Plot:  A well respected Chicago surgeon Dr. Richard Kimble has found out that his wife, Helen, has been murdered ferociously in her own home. The police found Kimble and accused him of the murder. Then, Kimble (without Justifiable Reason) was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. However, on the way to prison, Kimble's transport crashed. Kimble escapes and is now on the run. Deputy Samuel Gerard from Chicago takes charge of the chase of Kimble. Meanwhile, Kimble takes up his own investigation to find who really killed his wife, and to lure Gerard and his team into it as well.
Rotten Tomatoes:   This 1993 box-office smash partly adheres to the 1960s TV series on which it is based and partly goes off on several tangents of its own. Harrison Ford stars as Dr. Richard Kimble, convicted of murdering his wife. While being transferred to prison by bus, Kimble is involved in a spectacular bus-train collision (one of the best of its kind ever filmed). Surviving the disaster, Kimble escapes, vowing to track down the elusive professional criminal whom he holds responsible for the murder. Dogging the fugitive every foot of the way is U.S. marshal Sam Gerard (an Oscar-winning turn by Tommy Lee Jones), who announces his intention to search "every whorehouse, doghouse, and outhouse" to bring Kimble to justice. Unlike his dour TV-series counterpart Barry Morse, Jones plays the role with a sardonic sense of humor: when a cornered Kimble screams, "I didn't kill my wife," Gerard shrugs and famously replies, "I don't care." Once the premise has been established, scripters Jeb Stuart and David Twohy and director Andrew Davis pull off several audacious plot twists, ranging from Kimble's rendezvous with a sympathetic lab technician to a jaw-dropping dive into a huge waterfall. The second half of the film offers one surprise after another (including the true identity of the murderer), brilliantly avoiding the letdown that plagues many movie adaptations of old TV series. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

85%  Nominee:   The Piano  121 min,  R,  [Drama, Music, Romance]  [Jane Campion]  [11 Feb 1994]
Ratings & Reviews:  IMDb Reviews: 76%,   Rotten Tomatoes: 92%,   Metacritic: 89%,   External Reviews
Awards:  Won 3 Oscars. Another 60 wins & 56 nominations.
Actors:  Anna Paquin, Harvey Keitel, Holly Hunter, Sam Neill
Writer:  Jane Campion
External Links:  Rotten Tomatoes  IMDb     Language:  English, British Sign Language, Maori    Country:  New Zealand, Australia, France
Plot:  It is the mid-nineteenth century. Ada is a mute who has a young daughter, Flora. In an arranged marriage she leaves her native Scotland accompanied by her daughter and her beloved piano. Life in the rugged forests of New Zealand's North Island is not all she may have imagined and nor is her relationship with her new husband Stewart. She suffers torment and loss when Stewart sells her piano to a neighbour, George. Ada learns from George that she may earn back her piano by giving him piano lessons, but only with certain other conditions attached. At first Ada despises George but slowly their relationship is transformed and this propels them into a dire situation.
Rotten Tomatoes:   Writer/director Jane Campion's third feature unearthed emotional undercurrents and churning intensity in the story of a mute woman's rebellion in the recently colonized New Zealand wilderness of Victorian times. Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), a mute who has willed herself not to speak, and her strong-willed young daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) find themselves in the New Zealand wilderness, with Ada the imported bride of dullard land-grabber Stewart (Sam Neill). Ada immediately takes a dislike to Stewart when he refuses to carry her beloved piano home with them. But Stewart makes a deal with his overseer George Baines (Harvey Keitel) to take the piano off his hands. Attracted to Ada, Baines agrees to return the piano in exchange for a series of piano lessons that become a series of increasingly charged sexual encounters. As pent-up emotions of rage and desire swirl around all three characters, the savage wilderness begins to consume the tiny European enclave. Campion imbues her tale with an over-ripe tactility and a murky, poetic undertow that betray the characters' confined yet overpowering emotions: Ada's buried sensuality, Baines' hidden tenderness, and Stewart's suppressed anger and violence. The story unfolds like a Greek tragedy of the Outback, complete with a Greek chorus of Maori tribesmen and a blithely uncaring natural environment that envelops the characters like an additional player. Campion directs with discreet detachment, observing one character through the glances and squints of another as they peer through wooden slats, airy curtains, and the spaces between a character's fingers. She makes the film immediate and urgent by implicating the audience in characters' gazes. And she guides Hunter to a revelatory performance of silent film majesty. Relying on expressive glances and using body language to convey her soulful depths, Hunter became a modern Lillian Gish and won an Oscar for her performance, as did Paquin and Campion for her screenplay. Campion achieved something rare in contemporary cinema: a poetry of expression told in the form of an off-center melodrama. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

86%  Nominee:   The Remains of the Day  134 min,  PG,  [Drama, Romance]  [James Ivory]  [19 Nov 1993]
Ratings & Reviews:  IMDb Reviews: 79%,   Rotten Tomatoes: 95%,   Metacritic: 84%,   External Reviews
Awards:  Nominated for 8 Oscars. Another 16 wins & 31 nominations.
Actors:  Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Reeve, Emma Thompson, John Haycraft
Writer:  Kazuo Ishiguro (novel), Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (screenplay)
External Links:  Wikipedia  Rotten Tomatoes  IMDb     Language:  English, French, German    Country:  USA, UK
Plot:  A rule bound head butler's world of manners and decorum in the household he maintains is tested by the arrival of a housekeeper who falls in love with him in pre-WWII Britain. The possibility of romance and his master's cultivation of ties with the Nazi cause challenge his carefully maintained veneer of servitude.
Rotten Tomatoes:   Filmed with the usual meticulous attention to period and detail of films from Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, The Remains of the Day is based on a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Anthony Hopkins plays Stevens, the "perfect" butler to a prosperous British household of the 1930s. He is so unswervingly devoted to serving his master, a well-meaning but callow British lord (James Fox), that he shuts himself off from all emotions and familial relationships. New housekeeper Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson) tries to warm him up and awaken his humanity. But when duty calls, Stevens won't even attend his own dying father's last moments on earth. The butler also refuses to acknowledge the fact that his master is showing signs of pro-Nazi sentiments. Disillusioned by Hitler's duplicity, the master dies an embittered man, and only then does Stevens come to realize how his own silence has helped bring about this sad situation. Years later, regretting his lost opportunities in life, he tries once more to make contact with Miss Kenton, the only person who'd ever cared enough to seek out the human being inside the butler's cold veneer. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi