Another exceptional story that needed to be told.

Rating: 9/10 (29 August 2010)

A talented pianist (Adrien Brody) flees the Warsaw ghetto after his family is rounded up, and attempts to stay out of the hands of the Nazis.
The Pianist is a vivid Holocaust film that shows up the 'directedness' of Schindler's List (1993) by sticking closely to Wladyslaw Szpilman's first-person perspective; no museum piece, it is instead a living, breathing, haunting experience, shot through with omissions, elisions, and nagging details which refuse to be tidied up easily and thus carry an inherent aura of truth about them. The film's Babelian mix of languages and accents is a minor weakness, but it's a film where the words spoken mean so much less than the sounds heard and the sights seen: what use have we for words when faced with such indescribable horror? It won the Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay.