When the Nazis marched into Warsaw on October 1 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 concert pianist called Wladyslaw Szpilman, based on the autobiography he wrote immediately after the war.

Roman Polanski is a director who has almost made cinematic experimentation a trademark. But this is different. For Polanski, a survivor of the Cracow ghetto, it was important that this story tell itself without cinematic tricks.

Compromises are made - Polish characters speak in English rather than their mother tongue while the Germans speak German with subtitles. But the film still retains a strong air of authenticity.

In the opening scene Szpilman's recital of a piano sonata is cut short when a German bomb lands on the Polish radio station. Through Szpilman's eyes we watch as the Nazis gradually tighten their grip on Warsaw, stripping the jewish population of their jobs, their rights, their worldly goods, their dignity and eventually their lives.

Through good fortune and his talent as a pianist, Szpilman is saved from the gas chamber. He finds himself first working on a building site in the jewish ghetto, escapes from the ghetto to pursue a romance just before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and watches the rest of the war play out from his hide-outs around the city.

Over the course of two-and-a-half hours we see the horror of the nazi regime - the chilling ease with which the final solution is carried out and shockingly random acts of violence. Music provides hope though: when all else is stripped from him, Szpilman still has his Chopin (incidentally, beautifully rendered here). Music nourishes him and makes him human, even when he has been reduced to the level of a wild dog. It saves his life in more than one way.

It is interesting to see how Polansky deviates from wartime stereotypes and melodrama in a film that introduces a large and varied number of characters. He likes to tease you into thinking you've been here before, to keep you guessing.

Adrien Brody (Summer of Sam, The Thin Red Line) gives a gripping performance in the lead as we watch him turn from a sophisticated, confident young man at the beginning of the war to a shrunken, dishevelled figure foraging desperately through the ruins of Warsaw at the end of the war.

Credit too to the set designers - when you think that most of Warsaw was devastated by the heavy fighting at the end of the war, the recreation of period detail is remarkable.

The Pianist won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002 and it is easy to see why. It will leave you moved and enriched.