Simply a GREAT film.

Rating: Null/10 (9 August 2003)

I'm not sure what's worse- that master filmmaker Polanksi fails to pull-off a return to form with material obviously this personal, or that this film proves that there now is such a thing as a "Holocaust movie," a genre unto itself with its own very familiar conventions centered around an absolute and very REAL horror? While I'm sure the latter problem is something of one of the great aesthetic/ethical crimes of the current cinema for someone like Jean-Luc Godard, for the filmgoer it means stodgy drama and lack of emotional identification first and foremost. And how depressing to see Polanksi continue his twenty year streak of duds !