The Pianist

Brilliant pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew, witnesses the restrictions Nazis place on Jews in the Polish capital, from restricted access to the construction of the Warsaw ghetto. As his family is rounded up to be shipped off to the Nazi labor camps, he escapes deportation and eludes capture by living in the ruins of Warsaw.

“Polanski has spent his entire filmmaking career making movies that, steeped in alienation and paranoia, carry traces of the Holocaust. This time, faced with the historical event, he tempers his style, and the alienation and paranoia creep in from the outside, unescorted and relentless. With The Pianist, Polanski’s strange genius serves Szpilman’s remembrance.” — Manohla Dargis