THE Pianist is director Roman Polanski's Schindler's List. It's a solid, uncompromising account of the Holocaust through the eyes of one man.

It's also a true story.

Wladyslaw Szpilman (Brody) is a talented young Jewish pianist living in Warsaw with his family in 1939. It is a secure and happy existence until the Germans invade. A period of uncertainty follows as the city's Jewish community is persecuted and families rounded up and sent to concentration camps.

By a quirk of fate, Wladyslaw escapes the Nazis, but, resigned to never seeing his family again, faces a desperate and lonely quest for survival.

The Pianist is a moving yet remarkably unsentimental film, packing an emotional wallop without resorting to schmaltz.

Polanski has created the look and mood of wartime Warsaw superbly, the earlier scenes of gaiety in the city's bars and streets and the domestic bliss in the Szpilman home contrast starkly with the bleak, rubble-strewn landscape left by Nazi occupation.

But key to the whole film is the performance of Brody, who has got beneath Szpilman's skin to give a haunting performance that is quietly powerful and mesmeric.

Rating: 8 out of 10