This is a stately tale of how one man survived the Nazis' slaying of the Jews. Inevitably, and sadly, it must face comparison with Spielberg's Schindler's List.

However, there is one major difference between the directors - Polanski was himself a child survivor of the killing machine and lived through the Krakow ghetto and Auschwitz.

Perhaps as a result of this, there is none of Spielberg's stylisation of the subject; Polanski is happy to tell his tale as staightforwardly as possible, without embellishment.

Wladyslaw Szpilman was a noted virtuoso pianist when the German army swept into Warsaw, Poland, in 1939.

Slowly but surely the Nazi policy of ethnic cleansing clicked into place - the banning of Jews from restaurants and parks, and eventually the ghettos and deportation.

Szpilman's stroke of luck was an act of charity by a Jewish policeman friend, who let him slip through the lines and avoid certain death at Treblinka concentration camp.

From then on, he moved from flat to flat, staying one step ahead of the Germans and constantly at risk from Polish informants.

He bears witness to the courageous ghetto revolt and the Warsaw Uprising, which petered out under the cynical gaze of the Red Army, just across the Vistula.

It's the random, isolated incidents that shock - the slap Szpilman's father (Finlay) gets from an SS thug or the clinical shooting of a Jewess for having the temerity to ask a question.

There are no lingering shots of starved ghetto corpses - Polanski lets the camera wander without feeling the need to dwell on the suffering.

There has been some carping about the authenticity of certain scenes - such as the grand piano is discovered, still perfectly tuned, in a bombed-out house.

But this is nit-picking by the type of anoraks who declaim Saving Private Ryan because an extra is wearing the wrong sort of ammunition belt.

It's a sober, unsensational telling of a story that needs no flash histrionics or cinematic trickery to make its point.

And in the 'Good German' - the Wehrmacht officer Wilm Hosenfeld, who brought food to his hiding place - there is cause for optimism in even the darkest chapter of history.

Tim Evans