There are many good films released around the world every year. Masterpiece celebrates the best of the very best: genuinely superb works of cinema that come with FictionMachine‘s very highest recommendation. If we had our own Criterion Collection, these are the films we would want it to include.

A Jewish man, forced from his home and confined to a ghetto, says: ‘Last night I dreamt I was living in a room with ten people I didn’t know, and I wake up to find I’m living in a room with ten people I don’t know.’ And then he laughs. His friend, appalled, asks him why he laughs. His reply: ‘I have to laugh!’

There has been a lot said and written about Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 adaptation of Thomas Kenneally’s biographical novel Schindler’s Ark. Much of what is said is praise: it won both Best Picture and Best Director at the Academy Awards, for example. Many describe it as one of the greatest depictions of the Holocaust ever made, although some disagree – finding it mawkish and sentimental (a constant criticism of Spielberg as a filmmaker). Something hardly anybody seems to note about the film is that from time to time it is unexpectedly funny. There is a bleak, bitter seam of comedy that runs through its first half, soaked in absurdity and daring its audience to crack a smile. The humour is clearly there on purpose, and its presence is a master manoeuvre by its director and its screenwriter Steven Zaillian.

It is masterful for three reasons I think. Firstly, it is a tacit acknowledgement that the Holocaust – the collective murder of six million Jews and another half-million Roma, LGBTIQ, disabled, and dissenting people – is, in itself, a horrible act of absurdity. Its scale is unimaginable, and every aspect of it seems unlikely and bizarre. With the occasional funny moment, the two Stevens are essentially telling their audience that it is okay to become absorbed into the drama. For the same reason the film tends to stick closely to the same small group of Jewish prisoners – addressing six million victims in a narrative film is impossible, so we are instead led to focus on just a dozen or so individuals.

Secondly, it readies a contrast in the film’s content, where the earlier scenes of prejudicial violence are repellent and distasteful but the later scenes of industrialised mass murder are a further order of horrifying. As viewers we are in essence ‘let off the hook’ in the first half. As the mass killings begin, by and large the jokes stop. It helps to make later scenes even more impactful on the audience.

Finally, it is used regularly as a means of ridiculing and diminishing the various Nazi guards and soldiers. In one appalling moment, SS Untersturmführer Amon Goeth (an astonishingly effective Ralph Fiennes) drags a Jewish factory worker out into the snow and attempts to summarily execute the man. The gun jams in the cold, more than once. An enraged Goeth grabs a nearby soldier’s pistol, and it jams again. Frustrated and impotent, Goeth resorts the beating the man about the head with the frozen pistol before storming off – his intended victim still very much alive. It is horrific, but also deeply farcical. It renders the film’s various villains as pathetic, and helps make the unimaginable watchable.

Fellow film director Stanley Kubrick accurately pinpointed the reason why Schindler’s List is such an immersive drama, despite its subject matter. He argued that it was not a film about the Holocaust at all, saying ‘the Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about 600 who don’t.’ Nowhere is this more obvious than in an extended sequence where, mistakenly put on the wrong train by an administrative error, dozens of women from Oskar Schindler’s factory are sent to a concentration camp for extermination – only to be saved at the last moment. Millions of others were not saved. Spielberg does not tell us their story. That story cannot entertain us. This one can entertain and inform.

Technically the film is deeply impressive, not only presented almost entirely in black and white but also shot with visual reference to decades of earlier films. Bob Fosse’s film of Cabaret (1972) is a major influence, and one not often mentioned. Traditional Spielberg camera techniques – slow tracking shots and ‘god’ lights among them – are sparingly used, if they are used at all.

It is a film rich in detailed, complex performances. It is not just Fiennes’ extraordinary turn as Goeth. As Schindler himself, Liam Neeson makes a superb transition from war profiteer to quiet human rights crusader. Ben Kingsley gives Itshak Stern a nervous, exceedingly polite exterior over a steely, brave core.

Does the film get too sentimental and mawkish during the conclusion? It is arguable that it does, but it is simply not in the climax or dénouement where Schindler’s List makes its greatest achievements. It brought the Holocaust to a mass non-Jewish audience at a time when survivors were dying of old age, and testimony was at risk of being lost. To think that Spielberg directed both this and Jurassic Park in the same year. Most filmmakers could only dream at being so versatile.