The Pianist

Parents need to know that The Pianist is a 2002 Oscar-winning movie about a young Jewish musician living in Warsaw desperately trying to make sense of the Nazi invasion of his country and the subsequent degradations, the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the madness that led to the Holocaust. There is graphic violence, but unlike so many movies in which violence is shown simply to add surface-level excitement to an otherwise formulaic Hollywood blockbuster, the violence is intended to reveal a glimpse of the real-life horrors European Jews endured at the hands of the Nazis during World War II and to leave audiences with the conviction that atrocities and genocide such as this must never happen again. Nonetheless, the violence is graphic: Men and women are shot in the head for little to no reason, a man in a wheelchair is tossed off a balcony, a man lying injured in the road is run over by a tank. There is also the wartime violence of machine-gun battles, bombed-out cities, explosions, and casualties. Profanity includes "f--k" and "s--t." The movie should inspire thought and discussion on the extremes of evil and good in humankind, the individual acts of heroism undertaken by those whose names will never make the history books, and the transcendent and unifying nature of music and art. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails.