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The Pianist

The Pianist (Le Pianiste)

2002

Roman Polanski

Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Maureen Lipman, Ed Stoppard ...

8.2

154,108

Drama The film is adapted from the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew who detailed his survival during World War II. A composer and a pianist, he played the last live music heard over Polish radio airwaves before Nazi artillery hit. During the brutal occupation, he eluded deportation and remained in the devastated Warsaw ghetto. There, he struggled to stay alive even when cast away from those he loved. He would eventually ... [+]

	Media	Author	Review
		Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"A portrait of hell so shattering it's impossible to shake (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)"
		Mick LaSalle SFGATE	"The Holocaust has been the subject of many films. The Pianist is one of the great ones (...) Polanski's subjective approach takes us gradually into the horror"
		A. O. Scott The New York Times	"One of the very few nondocumentary movies about Jewish life and death under the Nazis that can be called definitive"
		Kirk Honeycutt The Hollywood Reporter	"The movie lacks those specific personal moments that pull an audience into a story and let them identify with a character"
		Richard Roeper Ebert & Roeper	"One of Polanski's best films"
		Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"[It] refuses to turn Szpilman's survival into a triumph and records it primarily as the story of a witness who was there, saw, and remembers (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)"
		Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"[A] heartfelt and high-minded Holocaust movie (...) Weighty and moving (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"
		Laura Bushell BBC	"Polanski's elegant film takes a classical, and rather methodical, approach to structure and style (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"
		Ian Freer Empire	"The fact that the director never once caves into easy sentiment or cheap hectoring is almost as amazing as the story itself (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"
		Geoff Andrew Time Out	"[Szpilman's] struggle simply to survive is rendered with increasing subtlety, and Brody's lead performance steadily comes into its own."
		Scott Tobias AV Club	"Polanski succeeds in making his hero an invisible man, but the sights he conjures are surprisingly artless and ordinary, familiar from a dozen other Holocaust dramas."
		Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader	"The results are masterful, admirably unsentimental, and never boring, if also a little stodgy."
		Ed Gonzalez Slant	"Polanski catalogs each and every moment that propels Wladyslaw that much closer to freedom with an elegant absurdism (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)"

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