Powerful story told with total honesty and great courage by a master film maker. David Lean would have been proud of this work.

Rating: 9/10 (24 January 2003)

"The Pianist", Roman Polanski's new movie is a tour d'force and should be seen by anyone who wants to even consider war of any kind.
The horror of this ...this terrible event in Warsaw , Poland from 1939 to 1945 is beyond imagination.
Adrien Brody plays the title role as Wladyslaw Szpilman, and I can't imagine any actor doing a more moving and profound job of portraying this incredible man. This is a griping epic about a terrible time and an even more terrible chain of events that are too horrible to imagine and for the same reason must never be forgotten.
Director Polanski catapults into a new class with this work. It is cruel and terrible to look at in many parts but often the truth is just that way. Dare I mention his name with David Lean? I think so.
I have to point to Thomas Kretschmann who plays Captain Wilm Hosenfeld with just the correct amount of Prussian correctness that must have come from his years of living in East Germany. But the world owes the real Wilm Hosenfeld too and it is not lost in the moment nor in the end. The Pianist is the first "9" I have given in years for a movie rating.
Perhaps as we are drawn to look clearly at the horror of what happened in Poland under Nazi occupation, maybe we can see fit to try to stop war wherever it may try to arise. It may not be within the formate of this forum but this film makes anyone who is sane see.
Now we have bigger guns and bigger bombs but the one common denominator is PEOPLE DIE just on a larger scale!!!! So I urge all to pray for peace and insist that this country who we all love and have served, will not set the precedent of a "first strike" against anyone. Whomever they might be!!!
If we start another Vietnam type thing and it runs the same sort of term as that terrible time, boys currently in the third grade at elementary schools all around our country could die there someday!!!!
However, if you or anyone you know has forgotten how terrible war and especially uncontrolled tyrants who want to wage war can be and what they can cause, go see this movie.
It is terrifying and Mesmerizing at the same time.
It should run away with the Academy Award but because it has not been widely seen I fear it will not. That in itself is almost a crime.