Best movies like Marcel Reich-Ranicki - Mein Leben

Karl from Germany and Marcelo from France emigrated to Argentina and became brothers-in-law. Karl soon returned to Germany to serve in the army. Marcelo and his children Julio and Chichi became Argentinean citizens but later returned to Paris. Karl became a general with a son (Heinrich) in the SS and in WWII he got a high job within the occupation administration in France.

The account of keepers of the Warsaw Zoo, Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who helped save hundreds of people and animals during the Nazi invasion.

A documentary that follows Anya, a woman residing in Ukraine during the early stages of the war, who tells her story and contemplates how countries will treat her fellow Ukrainians who were forced to flee.

In the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, Jews rise against the Nazis.

Run Boy Run is the true story of Jurek, an eight-year-old boy, who escapes from the Warsaw ghetto, then manages to survive in the woods and working as a farmhand, disguising himself as a Polish orphan. He encounters people who will betray him for a reward, who will beat him up or try to kill him, and he meets those, who will do and risk almost everything to help him. Jurek’s resilience is put to the ultimate test, when an accident cripples him, making it harder to find work. But he struggles on against all odds. Eventually the Russians reach his area and Jurek even finds a family where he could stay. Yet he is betrayed again, and a young man from a Jewish orphanage forcefully tries to bring Jurek back to his people and his faith.

A Nazi doctor—along with the Sonderkomando, Jews who are forced to work in the crematoria of Auschwitz against their fellow Jews—find themselves in a moral grey zone.

In the early days of Nazi Germany, a powerful noble family must adjust to life under the new dictatorship regime.

A dramatization of one man's rescue of Jewish refugees in the Nazi-occupied Polish city of Lvov. In Darkness tells the true story of Leopold Soha who risks his own life to save a dozen people from certain death. Initially only interested in his own good, the thief and burglar hides Jewish refugees for 14 months in the sewers of the Nazi-occupied town of Lvov (formerly Poland).

Ceci, a seven year old girl, has to keep a huge secret, but she doesn't completely understand what is the secret about. The life of her family depends on her silence. But what exactly must she keep silent about? Ceci and her mom live hidden from military repression in Argentina. Ceci asks herself: what must she say? What should she really believe and do in order to deserve the love of her mother and others?

During the Nazi occupation of Poland, an acting troupe becomes embroiled in a Polish soldier's efforts to track down a German spy.

What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)

Comedian Harmonists tells the story of a famous, German male sextet, five vocals and piano, the "Comedian Harmonists", from the day they meet first in 1927 to the day in 1934, when they become banned by the upcoming Nazis, because three of them are Jewish.

During the Second World War, tens of thousands of blonde, blue-eyed Polish children were snatched from their parents and given to German families. Lebensborn was part of Hitler's plan to expand the Aryan master race within the Third Reich. Eight-year old Jerzy returns home at the end of the war to a joyful reunion with his long-lost mother and grandfather. But problems arise as he is taunted by his peers and, longing for his missing father, burns with resentment for his new communist stepfather.

Set in 1913, 1936 and 2001. When he returns to the casino and seaside resort of his early teens, Louis, a 78 year old man encounters Olivia, a 19 year old young woman madly in love with a violent cad. Louis tells the story of his own mother having a passionate, driven fling with his Italian tennis instructor in 1936, and of Marie Collins Brown, the slightly older widowed woman who helped him through his confusion and pain by recounting the story of her passionate 24 hour fling with a hopeless young Polish gambler in 1913.

In the winter of 1943 two young Jews, Alek and Fryda, escape, via sewer tunnels, from the atrocities underway in Warsaw ghetto. Alek, entrusted with undeveloped photos of the horrors within, makes his way to a supposedly safe apartment only to find it occupied by Germans. Another tenant, a pole Stephania, abruptly offers to shelter him in her spacious apartment. She comforts him and they make love that very night. Stefania is uncommonly generous and willing to jeopardize her own safety by hiding a Jew. She even goes to a nearby church and rescues Fryda. But Fryda is ungrateful and proceeds to sabotage the trio's safety in insidious ways.

Irena Sendler is a Catholic social worker who has sympathized with the Jews since her childhood, when her physician father died of typhus contracted while treating poor Jewish patients. When she initially proposes saving Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto, her idea is met with skepticism by fellow workers, her parish priest, and even her own mother Janina.

A dramatic re-enactment of the Warsaw Ghetto Jewish uprising in April 1943 were 650 armed members of the Jewish Fighting Organization of Poland held off a 3,000 strong Nazi force in which only a handful of Jews survived. Tom Conti plays Dolek Berson, a Jewish smuggler who joins the resistance movement and is aided on the Aryan side of the wall by a former teacher named Regina Kowalski played by Rachel Roberts in her final role.

January 1942, in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. Thousands of Jews have been confined to the Warsaw ghetto for more than a year. Outside, life goes on; inside, they struggle to survive another day. Still, on a cold winter night, a group of Jewish actors manage to stage a lively musical comedy.

BEST BIRTHDAY EVER tells the story of Little Charlie, a small rabbit who lives with his loving family and pets in a house at the edge of town. Like many five-year olds, Little Charlie goes to a kindergarten and plays with his friends in the neighbourhood. He is used to having his parents’ full attention – but all of that changes when his baby sister Clara is born, leading to an unexpected adventure with his best friend Monica.

This is the true story about a group of Romani's (gypsy) in occupied Poland during World War II as they confront the atrocities and tragedies of a forgotten holocaust.

The eventful life of a humble Polish priest who once decried the pomp of the Catholic Church "a circus" and labeled the Pope a "prisoner of the Vatican" before ascending to the papal throne to usher Catholicism into the 21st century. Born in Poland and forced to carry on following the untimely death of his family, Karol Wojtyla endured both personal hardships and the rape of his homeland by the Third Reich to spread the word of God through the Catholic Church. Later, as Pope John Paul II, Wojtyla was beloved by millions of Catholics worldwide. From the sexual-abuse scandal that shook the American Catholic Church in the later-20th century to the murder of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero and the near-fatal assassination attempt made on his own life, Pope John Paul II endured to bridge the gap between various faiths until his death resulting from Parkinson's disease in April of 2005.

This documentary contains dramatized episodes about the lives of Erika and Klaus Mann, the brilliant children of German writer Thomas Mann.

Germany, 1929. Helmut Machemer and Erna Schwalbe fall madly in love and marry in 1932. Everything indicates that a bright future awaits them; but then, in 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rise to power and their lives are suddenly put in danger because of Erna's Jewish ancestry.

Delve into the life story and professional career of musical genius Steve Reich, considered one of the greatest American composers of the 20th century. Manfred Waffender's documentary reveals how Reich's minimalist style and phrasing innovations have altered the direction of musical history. Special attention is paid to "City Life," a collection of everyday streets sounds brought together to create an aural representation of the urban landscape.

Ada Lovelace was a most unlikely computer pioneer. In this film, Dr Hannah Fry tells the story of Ada's remarkable life. Born in the early 19th century, Ada was a countess of the realm, a scandalous socialite and an 'enchantress of numbers'. The film is an enthralling tale of how a life infused with brilliance, but blighted by illness and gambling addiction, helped give rise to the modern era of computing.

This remarkable trove of color footage, assembled from far-flung private and state collections, presents Hitler's Europe as never seen before. Amateur film enthusiasts - soldiers, tourists, Hitler's own pilot, even Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun - began experimenting with color film in the late 1930s, their camera eye recording the Third Reich from every angle. Some of this film was only recently uncovered in former Soviet-bloc archives, hidden for almost 60 years; all of it, thanks to digital technology, has been newly transferred to video with surprising clarity. (This documentary was produced with two different narratives, both an English and German language version.)

The Secret Diary Of The Holocaust tells the extraordinary tale of a 14-year-old Polish girl, Rutka Laskier, who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. In 2005, the school notebook in which Rutka recorded her last months in the ghetto of Bedzin was made public, six decades after she hid it under the floorboards of her home there. Rutka was immediately dubbed the 'Polish Anne Frank'. In her diary, Rutka wrote about her life in the ghetto in 1943, detailing not just the Nazi atrocities, physical hardship and hunger, but also how she was developing as a young woman. She also tells how she made a daring escape from one of the early 'aktions', Nazi round-ups of Jews for transportation. The documentary will unravel Rutka's story through the eyes of her half-sister, Israeli academic Zahava Scherz, on a journey to Poland in search of the sister she never knew.

In 2004, director Michael Kloft (The Goebbels Experiment) accompanied government historians and surveyors as they inspected various underground tunnels, bunkers, and silos built by the Nazis between 1940 and 1945. Some, mainly in Germany and occupied Poland, were built as shelters to house high-ranking Nazi officials like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Martin Bormann. Others, in the northern coast of occupied France, were constructed by Armaments Minister Albert Speer to serve as massive missile silos to launch V2 rocket attacks against London and, eventually, the United States. Interviews with surviving slave laborers and SS officials tell the story of how and why these tunnels were built. (from dvdverdict.com)

He described his love of art as his greatest inclination from his youth: Johann Joachim Winckelmann as a representative and rediscoverer of Greek and Roman antiquity. He was the father of European art history and was the victim of a robbery-murder in 1768. The documentary tells of his life, his work and his early death.

Set amidst stunning Ukrainian winter landscapes, vanishing villages and emerging feeling of alienation between people in a post-Soviet society, Stepne is a story of a mature man who comes back home from the city to take care of his dying mother. The mother’s passing, together with a meeting with his brother and a woman he loves make him reflect on the life he’s had and choices he’s made along the way. And then, just before her death, the mother tells Anatolii about a treasure she has buried inside the shed…

Coming of Age Drama in rural Poland in the summer of 1943.

It is early 1939 in Poland when Mrs. Bromley and Jennifer come to buy antiques for her business in London. Jennifer meets Count Stephen and they wine, dine and see the sights though out the city. He wishes to marry, but his family is against plain Jennifer. When she tries to leave, he catches her at the train station and they are married. To be self sufficient, they modernize the family farm with tractors and increase production, but then Germany starts the war.

This intelligently crafted, seven-time award winning festival favorite, tells the story of a young man, in a small seaside town, who learns a thing or two about love, luck and life from his well-traveled, outlaw grandfather. Born & Raised is a gritty, coming-of-age drama with a lot of heart and a ton of laughs.

A car tells its story and the story of its seven owners during the years of the Third Reich.

Ramona lives her lonely life in Berlin working in a lipstick factory. One day she accidentally runs into Andrzei, a Polish mechanic illegally selling cigarettes in Germany during the weekend. One thing leads to another, and soon she finds herself pregnant. Then her life starts falling apart, when Andrzei tells her he already has a wife back in Poland and her baby dies shortly after its premature birth.