Best movie of this year hands down!

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Typical Hollywood fare circa 1956 complete with a gypsy dancing sequence.Ingrid Bergman at 42 is too old for the role. She is playing 27 year old Anastasia. But everyone watched the movie to see Ingrid more than Anastasia.That is not to say the film was not entertaining, it was, although it started off slow. Also it is filmed almost entirely with stage sets which is depressing we are so spoiled these days.Why is it that a film that was made in 1956 and is supposed to take place in 1928 still looks like 1956? Something about the hairdos the way the women were trussed up even the way they walk...and finally as mentioned above the prerequisite gypsy dancing scene. You expect a Cadillac fin to be in the mix some place.A watch if you have nothing better make allowances for period Hollywood corn.

"Anastasia" is not a film for everyone. Those who insist on historical accuracy in films depicting real people and events would do best to stay away from the movie house altogether. "Anastasia," however, is not exactly about real people, although it does incorporate the lives of real humans and parallels with their true stories to depict a compelling "what-if" scenario and this is incredibly effective, even after DNA tests have revealed that "Anna Anderson" was definitely not Anastasia Nikolavena Romanov but instead, in all likelihood a Kashubian factory worker. (I am unaware whether she ever used the name "Anna Koreff.")As a matter of fact, those who are familiar with the real story are in for an even grander treat. We are thrown into 1928 Paris with a brief shot of this wretched madwoman at Russian Easter, lonely and rejected outside the Russian Orthodox Cathedral and on the brink of suicide, and we are definitely prepared to think of see as the impostor that "Anna Anderson" was. Yet as the film progresses, we are shown a woman quite literally without any past. Michael Thornton opined of the real "Anna Anderson," "Somewhere along the way she lost and rejected (Kashubian factory worker Franziska) Schanzkowska. She lost that person totally and accepted completely she was this new person."Ingrid Bergman's Anna Koreff, however, is not simply mentally lost: the world has lost her as well. It helps, perhaps, that Bergman is infinitely more convincing as a princess than as a vagabond, and the retrospective certitude of the falsity of "Anna Anderson"'s claim helps to disguise her limits at the beginning of the film when, like Yul Brynner's General Bounine, we are meant to doubt her identity. Bounine creates Koreff's new identity as the Grand Duchess Anastasia, and so effectively that he begins to believe in it himself. But the entirely unsolvable questions remain:Is Anna Koreff Anastasia? Does she actually believe she is Anastasia? More ominously, whoever she is, does she even truly and consciously remember?This piece carefully avoids resolving these questions. On the one hand, the speed and thoroughness with which she slides into her new role is difficult to explain and impossible to deny. On the other hand, the ending (among other things) is cleverly constructed so as to expose her assumed royal identity as a construction. This is not, of course, the real story, and in the post-1900 world, such a thorough and complete break with any sort of past anchor is next to impossible. But if it happened... this may be just how it happened."Anastasia" is above all a beautifully designed film, full of elegance and taste. Ingrid Bergman is as beautiful as the interior architecture against which she assumes her royal identity. Again, it is not a film for everyone: many will have great difficulty connecting and sympathizing with the royal circles and personalities in this tome, but those who are able to understand pre-modern, pre-liberal (c.f. human) sensibilities will love it. Helen Hayes is absolutely perfect and inspiring as the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (it is plain to see how the real Empress was so beloved in her adopted Russia), and her chemistry with Bergman is incredible to behold. The only thing I can find to critique is that the script--and to some extent a steely wall between Bergman and Brynner--does not fully back up the eventual culmination of the relationship between Koreff and Bounine; the conclusion fits quite well thematically but is mildly illogical with regard to the plot. Still, this is a minor complaint, as "Anastasia" is first and foremost a film about identity, and one that will jar and confound its viewers time and again.

Long ago, I found the basic premise of Anastasia captivating; but when I last saw this (in my teens, two decades ago) I was disappointed. Now, much later, I'm impressed to see some on-location photography in Paris. I was less pleased with the filtering of the idea through the romance genre (in the early reels) and the 'prestige production.' Both decisions are usually fatal. But as it proceeds it become smarter, more cynical entertainment than the usual offerings of the 50s, and although dated Bergman can certainly act.It doesn't generate a shred of anticipation over whether Bergman is Anastasia, but other merits make up for that. The DVD commentary from Sylvia Stoddard a scholar of Russian history is very appreciated when she's poring over history, less so when she's gushing about the movies acheivements.Martita Hunt who played Miss Havisham in David Lean's Great Expectations has a large role.

...if out there somewhere was a real Fair Lady transformed by an assassin's bullet into an amnesiac and requiring only expert coaching by a Pygmalion/Professor Higgins to blossom into a long-lost Russian princess. By pure coincidence this movie was released the same year (1956) that My Fair Lady opened on Broadway though so far as I can tell the parallels appear to have escaped virtually everyone. Bergman's last Hollywood film was the Australian-set Hitchcock turkey Under Capricorn seven years previously, seven lean years spent in banishment as penance for falling in love with and having a child by a man other than her husband, behaviour for which today she'd be lauded and this movie - and Bergman's performance - erases all memory of the Hitchcock debacle. Time and again it betrays its theatre origin, it was adapted from a successful Broadway play, and Bergman could hardly be bettered as the amnesiac who allows herself to be groomed by a trio of con-men led by Yul Brynner to pass herself off as Anastasia and almost as an afterthought picking up the ten million deposited by Czar Nicholas II for his children. There's even an obligatory 'graduation' set-piece which also parallels the one in My Fair Lady in which Anastasia and Eliza Doolittle respectively convince a collection of Royalty and Aristocrats of their lineage. This is top-of-the-range film-making with both Bergman and Helen Hayes at the top of their game.