The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

Honourable Mentions: Carlito's Way, The Fugitive, Jurassic Park

1993 was a momentous year for Steven Spielberg. One of the defining filmmakers of the seventies and eighties, Spielberg had emerged from the blockbuster successes of Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark with a string of critical and commercial hits that consistently belied a deeply introspective core - one that drew upon the filmmaker's childhood and parental trauma, which came full circle with his semi-autobiographical film, The Fabelmans, in 2022.

The past has long been a propellant for Spielberg. It was his father's aviator history during World War II that took him to Empire of the Sun in 1987, and his Jewish faith that compelled him to tackle one of the most horrific moments in humanity's history, the Holocaust, with Schindler's List in 1993.

The weight of the story was both crushing and jarring for the director, who had also been conducting post-production on the comparatively trivial-seeming Jurassic Park while shooting on the Holocaust biopic was underway. But that weight, the two-and-fro of Spielberg's relationship with his Jewish faith and identity, yielded an appropriately profound and devastating cinematic portrayal, the decision to shoot in black and white emphasising the darkness of the historical moment whilst also seeming to further animate the brutal wartime photography that emerged from the Nazi concentration camps as the Allies advanced into Germany.

Schindler's List is landmark cinema, and possibly Spielberg's crowning achievement as a filmmaker.