The Pianist (15)<br></br>The Man Without A Past (12a)<br></br>Ghost Ship (18)<br></br>I Spy (12a)<br></br>Stark Raving Mad (15)

In his latest film, The Pianist, Roman Polanski addresses a momentous subject that also happens to form a part of his early autobiography. When he was seven he escaped the Krakow ghetto during the Nazi liquidation of the Jews; his parents, however, were deported to Auschwitz and murdered. One senses in every frame of this film a determination to fill an absence, to convey exactly the pressure and detail of an experience whose horror, even now, affronts our understanding. It tells the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), a renowned Polish pianist whose first taste of the coming terror is to be blown off his piano stool when German shells pulverise the wall of a Warsaw radio station. By degrees, he and his family are sucked into a nightmare they believe too grotesque to last; instead, it escalates, and along with tens of thousands of Jews they are robbed, humiliated, beaten and relocated to a ghetto where they must either scavenge or starve.

Polanski's writer Ronald Harwood, drawing on Szpilman's 1946 memoir, doesn't shape this into a plot; he simply unspools events as they happened chronologically. The film derives its power from the dreadful accumulation of detail, which never looks anything but authentic – Polanski, after all, saw it for himself. The sheer randomness is horrifying. A top-floor apartment is raided by soldiers, who order the occupants to rise from the dinner table; one of them, unable to move from his wheelchair, is taken to the balcony and thrown on to the street below. Exhausted workers being marched home are halted by an officer, who selects six or seven, then shoots them in the head. Many of the images throb with poignancy; Szpilman, having just escaped the trains that have taken his family to certain death, walks in tears through a ghetto street piled with looted property, furniture, mementos. Outside a house he once knew lie corpses twisted in awful dereliction.

Polanski hasn't the organising genius of Spielberg, and his film doesn't have the moral inquisitiveness of Schindler's List. While Adrien Brody carries the sufferings of Job in his gaunt features, one may wonder at Harwood's reluctance to dig deep into his psyche. But then Polanski seems to be dealing with survival as an abstraction, and an inexplicable one at that. Szpilman doesn't survive through any special gift for bravery or cunning; he escapes because he has luck, and people to help him, where so many hundreds of thousands had neither. His late encounter with a Nazi officer who spares him is merely the most spectacular instance of fate withholding the finger. (Thomas Kretschmann, as the officer, is mysteriously awarded equal billing with Brody, though he figures only in the last half hour.Was his part heavily cut?) Whether Polanski thinks survival a miracle or a black joke isn't certain, but he has created something here that won't be forgotten.

Aki Kaurismaki's The Man Without a Past was, like The Pianist, an award winner at Cannes last year, and should advance the reputation of the Finnish director without collecting great swathes of new fans. Markku Peltola plays the title character, "M", who no sooner arrives in Helsinki than he is beaten half to death by thugs. Emerging from hospital with bruises but no memory, he starts to piece a new life together with the help of a Salvation Army volunteer (Kati Outinen). The film proceeds in a gentle fashion through the lightly absurd movements of its plot, while characters keep a straight face exchanging lines such as: "The peas were fine," and "I went to the moon yesterday." Weird, those Finns.

There are one or two good things about Ghost Ship, which concerns a salvage crew who come across a lost Italian cruise liner and discover that it's a floating hell. Graham Walker's production design is a spooky dream of rust and rotten luxury, and Gabriel Byrne as the crew's skipper is impressively ancient-marinerish as he recounts tales of doomed ships. Unfortunately, director Steve Beck steals from many better movies, while adding nothing cogent of his own; by the end his ghost ship is merely an incredible hull.

And here's a couple more to miss. I Spy is what a friend of mine used to call the "utterest rubbish", a buddy comedy thriller with one star who's yet to give of his best (Owen Wilson) and one who's way past his (Eddie Murphy), both on the trail of an invisible spy plane. Stark Raving Mad is a sort of cut-price Ocean's Eleven where the casino is a scuzzy nightclub and Seann William Scott stands in for George Clooney. Negligible stuff, though I did laugh at the line about the Chinese takeout guy.