Recent work

Pirates France/Tunisia 1986

Frantic US 1988

By general consent, Polanski's post-1980 films have struggled to match their predecessors. The broadly comic Pirates (1986) was a critical and commercial disaster, and the Paris-set thriller Frantic (1988) was an efficiently enjoyable Harrison Ford vehicle but little more, though it also introduced Polanski's third wife, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner.

Bitter Moon France/UK 1992

She also starred alongside Peter Coyote, Kristin Scott Thomas and Hugh Grant in the erotic black comedy Bitter Moon (1992), which showed flashes of the old Polanski magic, but it was sometimes hard to discern whether the laughs were intentional (Gilbert Adair described "a verbal description of a 'golden shower' so comically ecstatic it risked provoking a wave of golden showers in the audience, with spectators wetting themselves in hilarity"). Nonetheless, it remains Polanski's most characteristic film of this period.

Death and the Maiden UK/US/France 1995

The Ninth Gate France/Spain/US 1999

By contrast, Death and the Maiden (1995) was a competent but relatively anonymous adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's award-winning play based on his experience of torture under Chile's Pinochet regime. After falling out with John Travolta over the now-abandoned The Double (1996), he made the underrated The Ninth Gate (1999), returning to the theme of diabolical invocation so definitively explored in Rosemary's Baby. The result, though, was only mildly diverting.

The Pianist France/Poland/Germany/UK/US 2002

Nonetheless, expectations were sky-high for The Pianist (2002), the first time in forty years that Polanski had tackled a Polish subject and the first time ever that he had attempted to recreate the world of his childhood under Nazi occupation, though the film itself was based on the autobiography of musician Wladyslaw Szpilman. Though it won Polanski his first Cannes Palme d'Or and three Oscars including Best Director (which he judiciously did not accept in person), it was an oddly detached and surprisingly passive film, as though Polanski's personal experience of the Holocaust prevented him from fully engaging with it as a dramatic subject.

Oliver Twist 2005

Polanski's recent project, a big-budget adaptation of Oliver Twist, was inspired by his children (Morgane and Elvis, both with Emmanuelle Seigner) and an accompanying realisation that he had never made a child-friendly film. Dickens' classic had long been one of his favourite books, not least because of parallels with Polanski's own deprived childhood. The screenplay is by Ronald Harwood (who won an Oscar for The Pianist), and it was shot in Prague, the most popular current stand-in for Victorian London.