"Germans won't use Jewish toilets...the toilets are too clean for them."

Rating: 7/10 (10 January 2016)

Devastating adaptation of Wladyslaw Szpilman's WWII memoirs as a Polish Jew and classically trained pianist in 1939 Warsaw who continually escaped the clutches of the invading Nazis over a 5-year period. Saved from the concentration camps by the Jewish police, he relied on the Underground--as well as on one remarkable German soldier--to stay alive and eventually tell his story. Adrien Brody's sadly quizzical, sensitive face takes the screen like a beacon of light; he obviously put himself through hell to get this role just right, and his Oscar-winning performance is both physically demanding and emotionally rich. Not so some of the overacting supporting players, and Szpilman's close-knit family members come off too soft (however, the scene where the father splits a piece of caramel five ways is a heartbreaker). Roman Polanski won the Oscar as Best Director, however some of his bigger scenes (such as the Russian Liberation) don't pack the wallop expected. The filmmaker does catch the numbing brutality and violence of the time with an unerring eye, and the film is arguably a more lasting statement of Nazi-atrocity than Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List". Lengthy, but hypnotic; an unsettling, intense dramatic achievement. *** from ****