Niklas, Jan

Anne Frank - The Whole Story

Anne Frank: The Whole Story delivers exactly what it promises: the incredibly moving complete story of Anne Frank, going beyond what the Jewish teenage girl wrote in her widely read diary. Anne, along with her family and friends of her family, hid in a secret annex behind her father's office in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of Holland. She dutifully kept a diary, which became a worldwide bestseller when her father published it in the 1950s. The story has been adapted for television and movies before, but this version, which played on ABC television, moves beyond what Anne wrote, meeting up with the Frank family before Anne receives her diary, and following her past the diary's last entries into Auschwitz and Birkenau. Hannah Taylor Gordon is a superb Anne, bringing to life the multifaceted girl, in turns intelligent, dreamy, creative, spoiled, and bratty, a girl like any other except that Anne is a Jew in Nazi-occupied Holland. The only one who outshines Gordon is Ben Kingsley as Anne's father, Otto Frank. His quiet performance is extraordinarily powerful; as he watches his family slip away, it is impossible not to feel his grief. This brave film is difficult in parts to watch--the concentration camp scenes are brutal--but this is a remarkable adaptation of Anne's life, and it is a film to be shared and discussed and remembered. --Jenny Brown

The story of Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl who lived in hiding with her family during the Nazi occupation.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: UN
Release Date: 5-APR-2005
Media Type: DVD

The Plain Truth

A newborn is found dead in a serene, simple Amish farming community. Was it a tragic accident or could it be murder? That's the shocking question facing high-profile criminal lawyer Ellie Harrison (Mariska Hargitay), who ditches her self-indulgent city life to head to rural Pennsylvania. Ellie must defend an 18-year-old Amish girl, Katie (Alison Pill), who stands accused of killing her baby. Despite the surmounting evidence, the teen insists that she was never pregnant. While trying to learn her client's secrets, Ellie is forced to live with the Amish and attempts to break down the barriers of this very private society. Inspired by the best-selling Jodi Picoult novel of the same name.

DVD Features:
Deleted Scenes
Interviews:A look at the cast and crew of Plain Truth
TV Spot

Night Crossing

In the fall of 1979, one of history's most ingenious and courageous flights to freedom took place when two families fled from Communist East Germany to the West in their own handcrafted hot air balloon. Starring John Hurt (HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE), Jane Alexander (THE CIDER HOUSE RULES), and Beau Bridges, Walt Disney Pictures brings to the screen this remarkable true story of the Strelzyk and Wetzel families and their daring, death-defying escape.

Anastasia - The Mystery of Anna

The story of the woman who insisted she was Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last czar of Russia, is complicated. This 1986 telefilm makes it even more so because it's one of those "fact-based" dramas. Its most annoying invention is Anastasia's romance with a prince who never actually existed. Fiction aside, the first two-thirds of the 210-minute movie are dramatic and captivating. The Romanov family is imprisoned and executed, yet Anastasia reappears years later in Berlin in 1923; Amy Irving becomes the iron-willed yet fragile Anna who battles to be recognized by the remaining Romanovs. Gently paced and beautifully shot and staged, the film only starts to lose steam when Anna comes to New York to make her case in the American press. It takes a bunch of Americans, including Susan Lucci as a stateside Romanov relative, to make the tale seem common. Back in London, Olivia de Havilland is a treasure as the dowager empress who won't recognize Anastasia, although there is much evidence in her favor. The film is a great introduction to the mystery, despite its fiction-augmented recounting of history. After watching the movie, get the book it was largely based on, Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson by Peter Kurth, for a gripping read that just might make you believe in this princess. --Valerie J. Nelson

In July of 1918 the Bolsheviks shot Russian Czar Nicholas II his wife and their five children during the Russian Revolution. So begins the epic saga of Anna Anderson the woman who claimed until the day she died in 1984 that she was truly Grand Duchess Anastasia the youngest child of Czar Nicholas II and sole survivor of the family's execution. Her story became one of the greatest romantic mysteries of the twentieth century. This breathtaking adaptation of Anna's journey is also a depiction of a lost era from her days of Russian royalty her flight from execution and her years of struggle to reclaim her royal heritage. Amy Irving leads a luminary cast in this spectacular drama filled with triumph tragedy mystery and hope.Originally aired on TV in 1986.System Requirements:Run Time: 200 minsFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 783722738221 Manufacturer No: AFW27382

The Formula

A detective uncovers a formula that was devised by the Nazis in WWII to make gasoline from synthetic products thereby eliminating the necessity for oil --- and oil companies. A major oil company uncovers this and tries to destroy the formula and anyone who knows about it.System Requirements:Running Time: 93 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: MYSTERY/SUSPENSE/ESPIONAGE UPC: 879431000480 Manufacturer No: MAC48

21 Hours at Munich

September 5 1972. The darkest day in sports history. Some 900 million sports fans tune in to watch the Olympics on TV. Instead they see the most shocking scenes unfold... Academy Award® winner William Holden (Best Actor 1953 Stalag 17) and Academy Award® nominee Shirley Knight (Best Supporting Actress Nominee 1962 Sweet Bird of Youth) turn this real-life catastrophic event into a mesmerizing story of suspense anger and disbelief. The perpetrators wear tracksuits but they are anything but athletes. Known as Black September these Arab terrorists storm the Olympic village before dawn and take the Israeli team hostage. They make their demands as the minutes tick by. But from this point on it isn't about who takes home the gold. It's about who comes home at all.System Requirements:Running Time 101 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 027616130372 Manufacturer No: M100241

The House of the Spirits

The House of the Spirits is a generational tale of life among the ruling class in a South American country, as adapted from the Isabel Allende novel, but the political realities coexist very uneasily with the magical realism in this Bille August film. The star power alone (Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder, Antonio Banderas, Vanessa Redgrave, and Armin Mueller-Stahl) should have cranked it up a few notches, but that's not the case. Irons is appropriately cruel as the ambitious man who achieves wealth and makes everyone around him miserable and Streep is luminous, but it's slow and ponderous all the way. --Marshall Fine

The Life of Verdi

"Sumptuously costumed and splendidly staged, this elaborate cinematic biography blends documentary with drama to tell the story of a great artistic genius who became the musical voice of a nation."* Booklist. Filmed on location in Italy, Leningrad, London, and Paris, this epic mini-series took several years to create, requiring more than 100 actors, 1800 extras, and 4000 costumes. This uncut version dubbed in English is 4 hours longer than the edited version that originally aired on Public Television to great acclaim. This spectacular film is filled with Verdi's glorious music, sung in the original Italian and taken from past recordings featuring such operatic legends as Renata Tebaldi, Maria Callas, Luciano Pavarotti, and Birgit Nilsson. Stars Ronald Pickup, who plays Verdi with a "subdued, dignified passion" and Carla Fracci, the famed Italian ballerina, who is "absolutely superb" as Giuseppina Strepponi, Verdi's second wife (Clive Barnes).

Colonel Redl

The House of the Spirits

The House of the Spirits is a generational tale of life among the ruling class in a South American country, as adapted from the Isabel Allende novel, but the political realities coexist very uneasily with the magical realism in this Bille August film. The star power alone (Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder, Antonio Banderas, Vanessa Redgrave, and Armin Mueller-Stahl) should have cranked it up a few notches, but that's not the case. Irons is appropriately cruel as the ambitious man who achieves wealth and makes everyone around him miserable and Streep is luminous, but it's slow and ponderous all the way. --Marshall Fine