5/5 good if you like history
  by Ray R. Rendon (Houston, TX)
seller had it sealed wrap like stated, fast shipping... Thanks for the widescreen version and will buy in the near future again

5/5 Astonishing
  by E. Evans (Wilmington, NC)
This is a WONDERFUL Motion Picture from Director, Roman Polanski, dealing with the Holocaust and the Malevolent treatment of the Jews during WWII, starring Adrien Brody. His performance carries you through his adversity on his shoulders, while never losing his love of Music. Astonishing is putting it lightly. Subsistence of life is what makes this great work so amazing. A must watch. I give this an "A".


5/5 Never Expected Such a Great Movie
  by Vivian
I have know little about the way the Germans treated the Jewish people in that war. I learned a lot about how the Jewish people suffered, and my heart goes out to them all.
I could not take my eyes off the screen. How this man suffer and his family and all the Jewish people.
From the title of the movie I did not expect such an intense movie. My applause to the director and actors/actresses.
Great movie to learn from; lots of truth about what happen back then to the Jewish people.
I sent my oldest sister a copy of the DVD, The Pianist. I'm sure she's going to love it. It's a tear jerkier.

May God Bless All The Jewish People That lost Family Due to the War.
Vivianne

3/5 Holocaust for Beginners?
  by Wendy L. Trimboli (Omaha)
I was expecting great things from this Triple-Academy-Award-winning picture. I hoped for a previously-untold perspective on the much-documented (and rightfully so)topic of the Holocaust. Sadly, this film brings nothing new to the mix. The extent of its power is limited by attempts to manipulate the emotions of the audience with depictions of meaningless brutality by cardboard "Nazi thugs" upon equally-cardboard "innocent Jews". If you've seen Schindler's List or The Hiding Place or the Anne Frank mini series, you'll recognize many revisited topics and cliches that have been portrayed better elsewhere.

Adrien Brody gives a decent, tortuous performance that has its moments. He is expressive in his silent observations of the world crumbling around him, and it's impossible not to care about his fate. Still, I'm embarrassed to admit that I was more deeply moved by his performance in Darjeeling Limited--the part where he tries to rescue a drowning child--than by his passive, anti-heroic lurking here.

I also spent entirely too much time during and after the film pondering the point--or pointlessness?--of it all. What is the bottom line here? That life was miserable for Polish Jews in the 40s? Was 2.5 hours of brutality, of watching a man gradually starve, frame by excruciating frame, really necessary, when other, better movies and documentaries have already hammered the point home? I suspected the director didn't trust the intelligence of his audience, especially when he whipped out well-worn lines from the Merchant of Venice and even displayed the title just in case we were unsure of the source of the quote. I had also expected some sort of theme regarding the redemptive quality of music, but even the gorgeous piano playing is restricted to a few scenes and ignored for most of the film.

The best scene in which the unlikely sympathy of a German officer saves Brody's pianist's life is truly touching, but the much-needed pathos is only partially developed. Based on the depictions of all the Nazi characters up until this point, the officer is an unexplainable anomaly whose motivations, background, and psychology are completely ignored. What makes this one man good, and the rest of them evil? Coming so late in the game, the addition of this sole non-stereotyped character with an appreciation for fine music feels tacked on. It's also hard to ignore the fact that minutes before, Brody had been fumbling with frost-bitten fingers to open a can of pickles. Suddenly, he launches into a "Shine"-worthy musical performance...

Overall, a simplistic and overly moralizing--though historically accurate--depiction of one man's survival of the Holocaust that inspires horror, if not pathos, in the audience. The Big Issues--the gradual whittling away of Jewish rights that eventually lead to mass extermination--are chronologically well depicted, but a meaningful discussion on the source of the hatred in all its complexity is absent here.

5/5 Raw and Unflinching... An appropriate depiction of the disasterous Holocaust
  by Filmbuff-reads stuff (Brooklyn, NY)
There is a lot to be said about the Holocaust by almost everyone, so whatever I can add will be a fraction of a much contemplated and discussed event of the abject inhumanity and abhorrence of this time period. The victim is the Jew, but the important lesson of the Holocaust extends far beyond the Jewish race because those who chose to look away and appease were not able to do so for long. The Nazis hunted everyone... the all-mighty power of France was occupied, and many of them acted as the Poles and gave away their Jews with pleasure; Great Britain, the most powerful nation for centuries before, had their very survival on the edge of extinction; the Nazis had even declared war on our beloved United States. So the identity of the Jew is not the focus; humanity was beaten, brutalized, gassed, demeaned, and raped of its dignity by allowing this to happen, and as the film shows when Hosenfeld and the other Nazis are jailed in Soviet Union prison camps, in any given situation, the twist of power and conceit can make what was once the victorious and all-powerful become the defeated and victimized.

Brody's acting is perfectly suited for the role, and there could not have been any better director than Roman Polanski telling this story. All the other details of the film are exquisite, and the screenplay, as an adaption of the book (which I haven't read), is masterful and treated with the realism that only a skilled writer could evoke by research and contact with those who were there. Naturally Roman Polanski's own Holocaust survival plays an important contribution to the story, and the little details he adds-- such as when Szpilman is saved by a Jewish guard just before he is about to join his family on the deportation train to Auschwitz-- deliver a shuddering, nuanced drama to the story that is not formalized, but raw and honest to the reality surrounding this event. The guard yells, "Don't run," and in the documentary special feature on the DVD, Polanski intimates that this was not Spzilman's experience, but his very own when he escaped from the Krakow ghetto.

The film is a huge undertaking and is unbelievably sobering. It leaves me with the unsettling and cold realization that humanity can be unspeakably, monstrously, disgustingly evil. It is important to understand the enemy, to not appease with relative morality and pontification. In matters such as these, military action on the part of the allies was the only answer.

I add this as something to learn from this period, not as a supporter of war and the current situation we are put in now. The message of art and hope and peace and good people on all sides, even German, is not lost on me. But the distinction that should be made clear on this subject is that the atrocity and inhumanity of the period is the core of the event and the film's message of hope and individual survival is the heart of this story-- a beautiful story at that. Not everyone was strong enough or lucky enough to survive, so the story of hope is important, but understanding the bigger picture is paramount. This is Roman Polanksi's masterpiece and it is so much more than a film because it is based on real life. It is absolutely unforgettable; one of my top films of all time.