65. THE PIANIST
 
France/Poland/Germany/UK
dir. Roman Polanski
world premiere 2002
U.S. release 2002
 

 
Because Polanski sustains two precarious balancing-acts: he reprises all his trademarks of formal tension and chilly irony while nonetheless honoring a mainstream genre that often resists more individual styles; and he delivers scene after indelible scene of escaping the Nazis and avoiding the Holocaust, while somehow making a movie that all comes together in the closing sequence.