Adrien Brody as holocaust survivor, Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist

When the Nazis marched into Warsaw on 1 October 1939 there were 360,000 Jews living in the Polish capital. By the time the allies drove the Nazis out in January 1945 there were reckoned to be less than 20 Jews left. The Pianist is the intimate story of one of those survivors, a young concert pianist called Wladyslaw Szpilman, based on the autobiography he wrote immediately after the war.

Director Roman Polanski, himself a survivor of the holocaust in Cracow, wanted this story to tell itself without cinematic tricks. The final result is something that is economical, accessible, and, although Polish characters speak in English while the Germans speak German with subtitles, has a real air of authenticity.

In the opening, Szpilman is playing a soft piano sonata when a bomb lands on the Polish radio station, announcing the Nazis’ arrival. For a while, he and his family live in hope that nazi rule will be shortlived, however, as the aggressors tighten their stranglehold on Warsaw we watch as they are deprived of their jobs, their rights, their worldly goods, their dignity and eventually their lives.

Through good fortune and his musical gift our hero is saved. He escapes the Jewish ghetto to pursue an impossible romance and finds himself watching the war play out through windows from hide-outs in the city - which as it turns out proves to be a highly effective way of condensing war into the short space of a film.

Throughout all this music plays a vital role, both teasing the fugitive Szpilman into revealing himself, and offering spiritual nourishment in the face of chilling and random brutality. Adrien Brody, in the lead role, gives a remarkable performance as we watch him transform from the sophisticated young man of the beginning to the gaunt, dishevelled figure foraging in the ruins of Warsaw at the end of the war. It is easy to see why The Pianist was the winner of the coveted Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year. You leave the cinema moved and enriched.

About Schmidt (now playing)

When Thoreau wrote that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" he could have had Warren Schmidt in mind. Jack Nicolson plays the down-in-the-dumps insurance actuary of the title, who slopes off into retirement with the weary resignation of a person worn down by a lifetime of compromises.

The spontaneous decision to sponsor a Tanzanian orphan named Ndugu, after seeing a TV advertisement, provides the unlikely catalyst for Schmidt to break out of his torpor, venting his inner angst and frustration in long letters to his new-found “son”. He rails against his nagging wife (“Who is this old woman living in my house?"), the “nincompoop” that his precious daughter is about to marry and the “young punk” who has filled his work shoes.

Then his wife dies suddenly. Such is the way of this black comedy - just when Schmidt seems to be finding himself he is dragged even deeper into inner turmoil.

There is little relief elsewhere. Writer/director Alexander Payne’s screenplay, adapted from Louis Begley’s novel, paints a dreary mid-Western America of bland landscapes and gaudy interiors, populated by kooky, irritatingly small-minded folk. The script is peppered with bitter comic observations but such an unattractive lead would be difficult to spend over two hours with were it not Jack Nicholson’s admirably restrained performance.

Hair combed over, he waddles through the film arms stiffly thrust at his side wearing a curiously bland expression. The old Jack charisma does peep through the cracks - the diatribes and musings as he writes to Ndugu give Nicolson an excuse to cut loose, albeit only in voice-over - and he succeeds in gripping your attention with the smallest of gestures - a twitch here, a fidget there. That the ambivalent conclusion is surprisingly moving is a credit to Nicolson’s performance more than anything.

Two Towns of Jasper
PBS Wednesday, January 22, at 9pm.

In 1998 three neo-nazis from the tiny town of Jasper, Texas, dragged James Byrd Jr three miles from the back of their pick-up truck before dropping his decapitated body in a black cemetry. Two camera crews, one black and one white, returned to the town to tell the story and in what is a remarkably candid piece.