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100A great movie on a powerful, essential subject -- the Holocaust years in Poland -- directed with such artistry and skill that, as we watch, the barriers of the screen seem to melt away.
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100One of the great Holocaust films.
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100There are three Poles in The Pianist -- Szpilman, Polanski, and Frederic Chopin. Of the three, fittingly, Chopin speaks the loudest.
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100Roman Polanski's new movie may be the greatest historical film centered on an enigmatic character since Lawrence of Arabia.
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100The director seems to be saying that, for survivors, art may be a way back to our finer selves -- extraordinary.
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100The best film of 2002.
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100Polanski, himself a survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland, has created a near-masterpiece.
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100A beautiful story, told in measured cadences by a master of old-timey narrative compression and expression.
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91The result is a movie, and Cannes Palme d'Or winner, of riveting power and sadness, a great match of film and filmmaker -- and star, too.
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91It's no wonder that Polanski, himself an artist who has survived a series of nightmares, should tell it so naturally and powerfully.
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90Polanski’s strongest and most personally felt movie.
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90There have been other films dealing with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland -- some very good -- but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best.
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90Never before has a fiction film so clearly and to such devastating effect laid out the calculation of the Nazi machinery of death and its irrationality.
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90Polanski, who was a Jewish child in Krakow when the Germans arrived in September 1939, presents Szpilman's story with bleak, acid humor and with a ruthless objectivity that encompasses both cynicism and compassion.
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90This powerful, precision-made movie offers hope as well -- an act of kindness from a German officer that saves the pianist’s life, the music that sustains his soul.
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90The results are masterful, admirably unsentimental, and never boring, if also a little stodgy.
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89Szpilman takes to performing sonatas in thin air, eyes closed, those jittery fingers stroking nothing but air. It's a wonderful moment in a wonderful, ghastly film, and one of the most moving arguments for the redemptive powers of art ever made.
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88Nothing can detract from the film as a portrait of hell so shattering it's impossible to shake.
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88The closing scenes of the movie involve Szpilman's confrontation with a German captain named Wilm Hosenfeld -- Polanski's direction of this scene, his use of pause and nuance, is masterful.
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88If The Pianist isn't quite as devastating as "Schindler's List" -- the movie with which all other Holocaust movies must be compared -- it's because Polanski isn't interested in an expansive view of the war.
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88The power of the arts to transcend cultural differences is presumably what moves the German to spare Szpilman, and, perhaps, is the key to Polanski's salvation as well.
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88To the extent that movies bear the residue of their filmmakers' autobiographies, I found The Pianist particularly compelling.
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88With this 2002 Cannes Film Festival best-picture winner, Polanski skips the quirky flourishes and simply brings history to life.
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88Crafted without a whiff of melodrama, this motion picture takes a steady, unflinching look at the plight of Jews in Warsaw.
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88Polanski's view of life is like that of Greek tragedy, with the same cold comfort that tragedy implies; from the larger perspective which art gives us, we know even horrors eventually pass.
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88After an hour, The Pianist stops being the Holocaust movie and becomes a Holocaust movie.