Roman Polanski: reviews, themes and essential works

The Profile

Polish-French film director and screenwriter known for psychologically intense thrillers and dramas, including Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and The Pianist.

Academy Award for Best Director for The Pianist (2003); The Pianist won the Palme d’Or at Cannes (2002); associated with the “apartment trilogy” (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant). Legal issues, including a 1977 U.S. case and a 2009 arrest in Switzerland, are matters of public record.

DeBaser’s reviews paint Roman Polanski as a master of psychological space and moral ambiguity, from Repulsion’s spirals of madness to The Pianist’s stark human endurance. Horror, thriller, and dark comedy blend with tight, enclosed settings and precise craft. Highlights include The Tenant, The Ninth Gate, Venus in Fur, and The Ghost Writer, alongside acknowledged landmarks like Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown.

Notable Quotes

❝ “Madness is frightening because you know that you come to yourself”

❝ Polanski copies himself using the structure of the splendid “Carnage” and bets everything on the quality of the two carefully chosen actors and on the quality of the witty, cynical, brilliant, sarcastic dialogues that make you laugh heartily and reflect.

❝ And not by chance, I believe that this The Ninth Gate is probably one of the best films on this subject.

❝ Desperate is the human condition, and on the screen, one witnesses a clear allegory of it, as well as, on the other hand, the condition of the foreigner, the man uprooted from his own home.

❝ Definitely successful, however, is the final scene: those sheets flying away in the wind, yet another hope of truth vanished, yet another demonstration of the smallness of man in the face of the vast darkness of a “world” that is better left untouched...