or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
The Pianist (Studio Canal Collection) [Blu-ray] [2002]
 
See larger image
 

The Pianist (Studio Canal Collection) [Blu-ray] [2002]

Adrien Brody , Emilia Fox    Suitable for 15 years and over   Blu-ray
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (108 customer reviews)
RRP: £24.99
Price: £15.93 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £9.06 (36%)
Pre-order Price Guarantee. Learn more.
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
This title will be released on September 13, 2010.
Pre-order now!
Items for dispatch to UK will be sold by Amazon's Preferred Merchant. (Why?)
DVD and Blu-ray Steals--Up to 70% Off
Find some fabulous bargains in our DVD and Blu-ray Steals promotion. It's pure theft.

Special Offers and Product Promotions

  • Pre-order Price Guarantee: order now and if the Amazon.co.uk price decreases between the time you place your order and the release date, you'll be charged the lowest price. Here's how (terms and conditions apply)
  • N.B. This title is in high definition format and needs to be played on a Blu-ray player. To find out more about Blu-ray, visit our Hi-Def Learn & Shop store.

  • Firmware Updates: Having trouble with your Blu-ray disc player? Will certain discs just not play? You may need to update the firmware inside your player. Click here to learn more.


Frequently Bought Together

Customers buy this item with The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas [DVD] [2008] £4.93

The Pianist (Studio Canal Collection) [Blu-ray] [2002] + The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas [DVD] [2008]
Price For Both: £20.86

One of these items is dispatched sooner than the other. Show details

  • This item: The Pianist (Studio Canal Collection) [Blu-ray] [2002]

    This title will be released on September 13, 2010.
    Pre-order now!
    Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk.
    This item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions

  • The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas [DVD] [2008]

    In stock.
    Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk.
    This item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions


What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

The Pianist [Blu-ray] [2002]
93% buy
The Pianist [Blu-ray] [2002] 4.5 out of 5 stars (108)
£6.99
The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas [DVD] [2008]
3% buy
The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas [DVD] [2008] 4.3 out of 5 stars (217)
£4.93
Schindler's List [Blu-ray]
2% buy
Schindler's List [Blu-ray] 4.6 out of 5 stars (92)
Psycho - 50th Anniversary Special Edition Steelbook [Blu-ray] [1960]
1% buy
Psycho - 50th Anniversary Special Edition Steelbook [Blu-ray] [1960] 5.0 out of 5 stars (8)
£15.93

Product details

  • Actors: Adrien Brody, Emilia Fox, Maureen Lipman
  • Format: Anamorphic, Colour, PAL, Widescreen
  • Language English
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9 - 1.78:1
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Classification: 15
  • Studio: Elevation Sales
  • DVD Release Date: 13 Sep 2010
  • Run Time: 149 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (108 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B003PHJLSM
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 29,114 in DVD (See Top 100 in DVD)

Reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review

Winner of the prestigious Golden Palm award at the 2002 Cannes film festival, The Pianist is the film that Roman Polanski was born to direct. A childhood survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland, Polanski was uniquely suited to tell the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew and concert pianist (played by Adrien Brody) who witnessed the Nazi invasion of Warsaw, miraculously eluded the Nazi death camps, and survived throughout World War II by hiding among the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. Unlike any previous dramatization of the Nazi holocaust, The Pianist steadfastly maintains its protagonist's singular point of view, allowing Polanski to create an intimate odyssey on an epic wartime scale, drawing a direct parallel between Szpilman's tenacious, primitive existence and the wholesale destruction of the city he refuses to abandon. Uncompromising in its physical and emotional authenticity, The Pianist strikes an ultimate note of hope and soulful purity. As with Schindler's List, it's one of the greatest films ever made about humanity's darkest chapter. --Jeff Shannon

DVD Description

The Studio Canal Collection presents...

Based on a true story, The Pianist tells the story of a brilliant Polish pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman (Academy Award ® Winner, Adrien Brody), a Jew, who escapes deportation to the German detention camps during World War II. Forced to live in the heart of the Warsaw ghetto, he shares the humiliation and the struggles of the occupation whilst hiding in the ruins of the capital. From acclaimed director Roman Polanski, who won an Oscar for the film, as did Ronald Harwood, for his script.

Special Features:
- Original Trailer
- A story of survival: behind the scene of the pianist
- Interview with writer Ronald Harwood
- Interview with Andrzej Szpilzman
- Interview with Daniel Szpilzman


Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought


Suggested Tags from Similar Products

 (What's this?)
Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
 
(1)

Your tags: Add your first tag
 

 

Customer Reviews

108 Reviews
5 star:
 (80)
4 star:
 (15)
3 star:
 (3)
2 star:
 (6)
1 star:
 (4)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (108 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Polanski and Brody Bring Szpilman's Story To Life-Brilliant!, 16 Feb 2005
By Jana L. Perskie "ceruleana" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Pianist [DVD] [2003] (DVD)
Director Roman Polanski had much personal history to draw on, when he directed "The Pianist." He spent his own childhood in Poland, and escaped from the Krakow Ghetto, although his mother, and other family members, perished in the Holocaust. Polanski makes this his most personal and powerful film to date, and deservingly won the Academy Award Oscar for Best Director.
"The Pianist" is the agonizing story of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman's survival of the Nazi's destruction of Polish Jewry.

The film begins in 1939, with Szpilman playing Chopin on the piano for Radio Warsaw, as the Germans bomb the city, and finally force him to stop playing. History has documented well what happened in Warsaw over the following two years - the Jewish ghetto was constructed and settled, racial laws were written and enforced, people died of starvation, illness, or Nazi murder. Then the "resettlement" roundups began. Szpilman was waiting at the Umshagplatz to be deported to Treblinka, with his family, when fate seemingly intervened, and he was spared. His survival story is a different kind of hell than others that I have seen or read about. Szpilman watches the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and subsequent destruction, from the outside, looking in. Usually, accounts of the Jewish uprising are from former fighters, or survivors, who were inside the ghetto at the time. I can only wonder if Szpilman longed to join his fellow Jews and fight the Nazis, rather than remain in his solitary apartment overlooking the ghetto, with his own end unknown.

The story is told from a uniquely unsentimental point of view. I felt at times that Szpilman, brilliantly portrayed by Adrien Brody, had distanced himself from all emotion, except for the periods when he played the piano in his imagination, and listened to music in his head. Perhaps this detachment was the mechanism that allowed him to survive emotionally.

The well-written screenplay, by Ronald Harwood, was adapted from Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoirs published in 1946. During some of the movie's most emotional parts, there are amazing camera shots of snow falling, or leaves blowing across an empty street, or the snow covered ghetto ruins that look like the end of the world, with the only sound - Chopin's piano music. These film takes add emotion to the film, compensate for, and contrast well with Szpilman's emotional isolation.

There is a haunting scene, near the film's end, with Szpilman and a German officer, that still moves me to tears when I think about it.

The film is a remarkable in its sensitivity, and portrayal of one man's struggle to survive. I highly recommend it.
JANA

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


 
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Absorbing and Symbolic Film, 10 Nov 2004
By L. Davidson (Belfast, N.Ireland) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Pianist [DVD] [2003] (DVD)
Unlike the previous reviewer, I have decided to go for the Full Monty and give "The Pianist" a 5 star rating. The film is a biopic of the talented Jewish pianist Wladislaw Szpilman ,set against the backdrop of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw throughout World War Two. The full scale of the persecution of the Polish Jews during this period is laid bare, as verbal abuse turned to physical assault, dehumanisation , ghettoisation and ultimately extermination."The Pianist" is the story of Szpilman's personal experience of these times as he is thrown from the cosseted surroundings of his prime time slot playing Chopin on Polish Rundfunk into the grim surroundings of the Warsaw ghetto with all its deprivation,uncertainty and terror.As he gets separated from his family and friends, a primeval and astonishing lust for survival consumes Szpilman as he faces all manners of peril."The Pianist" is a gripping film from beginning to end with Adrien Brody playing Szpilman with great skill and emotion as chaos and confusion engulf his well ordered life. It is as harrowing, but not as graphic as "Schindlers List" , but it captures perfectly the demonic nature of the Nazis and the sense of dread and terror that surrounded their occupation. However I rated "The Pianist" so highly because of the thread of metaphysical symbolism that ran through it. Szpilman and his music were the corporeal expression of the human spirit, perhaps even of the Holy Spirit, surrounded by an almost supernatural hate, forced into hiding , stalked by terror, but never extinguished.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


 
33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Surviving destruction and genocide, 10 Jun 2008
By Gary Selikow (Great Kush) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Pianist [2002] [DVD] (DVD)
The Pianist is the true story of the struggle to survive the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto of Polish Jewish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman.

It tells how he survived against the odds , hiding in various parts of the city , before his life was saved by a German officer , who despised the Nazis brutality and genocide , a true righteous gentile , Captain Wilm Hosenfeld.
Unlike many personal holocaust accounts , which are of concentration and death camps , this one is an account of life and death in the Warsaw ghetto.

The movie portrays life and death in the ghetto : the disease , the starvation and the Nazi mass murders of hundreds of thousands of men , women and children. The imagery of the ghetto is brough to life, with heartrending scenes of the Jews being herded into and out of the ghetto and of Nazi brutality. REcreated scenes, will stay with the viewer, like a young woman being shot in the head for asking the Nazi guard where the Nazis are taking them, a mother holding a small boy who is dying of thirst, and begging for water for her child.
A little girl, holding an empty bird cage, and crying because she cannot find her family.
Roman Polanski has showed his flare for directing once again, and brilliant acting by Adrien Brody as Wladyslaw Szpilman, Emilia Fox as his gentile female friend Dorota, and Thomas Kretschmann as Captain Wilm Hosenfeld.
A story of one man's quest for survival, among the cruel genocide of millions.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Just brilliant
Just brilliant. This film should be watched by everyone, but especially schoolchildren learning about the War, and by anyone with any leaning whatsoever towards racism. Read more
Published 18 days ago by Abaco Books

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic film
I first watched this film when I was quite young so obviously didn't understand it, but I remembered the last piano scene so thought I'd watch it again many years later. Read more
Published 18 days ago by S.Bartlett

5.0 out of 5 stars Well done Optimum
I have given this film 5 stars as i agree with almost all the reviews listed.It is quite simply superb. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Mr. S. H. J. Palmer

1.0 out of 5 stars wish I could watch it!!!!
Amazon asked me to review this film! Shame they can't sort out my blu-ray so that I can actually watch it - and understand it! Read more
Published 2 months ago by benny

5.0 out of 5 stars The Pianist
Very powerful film exceptionally well made.One film that has to be watched as it brings home the horrors not only of war, but the real loss on real people when conflict sweeps... Read more
Published 3 months ago by L. Singh

5.0 out of 5 stars Atmospheric and hard-hitting
This was compelling viewing, once I had seen it I had to order it for myself and a friend also. I couldn't tear myself away from it, had me on the edge of my seat. Read more
Published 5 months ago by M. Shapter

5.0 out of 5 stars The Pianist. A Must Watch Film
This a film that should seen by every one.
A true story that is a real eye opener,and brings home the truth of what went on during the Second War. Read more
Published 6 months ago by M. Foulds

5.0 out of 5 stars The Pianist
Being based on a real person gives it more appeal. Factual content very informative.
Published 7 months ago by Cheryl Hamilton

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent film
The pianist is a very good film. It was very thought prevoking. It made me realise just how much the jews went threw and hw lucky we are today.
Published 7 months ago by Mrs. H. L. Brett

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent movie, but documentary missing from DVD
This is a wonderful movie. The acting, storyline and imagery are excellent and the tone very down-to-earth. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Jenny

Only search this product's reviews



Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   
Related forums


Listmania!


Look for similar items by category


Look for similar items by subject






i.e., each product must be in subject 1 AND subject 2 AND ...

Feedback


Amazon.co.uk Privacy Statement Amazon.co.uk Delivery Information Amazon.co.uk Returns & Exchanges

Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.