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Very Cool!!!

Nice effects though.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

This was different than I thought in that I thought it would be a musical. I think I had this confused with "The King And I". I thought they were made by the same creator, but I believe I'm wrong. I was aware of the death of Nicholas II of Russia and his family. I had no idea there were actually real people who claimed to be his daughter Anastasia or even thought they were. This movie features an amnesiac who meets these people who want her to impersonate Anastasia.The best scenes are when she's talking to the real Anastasia's grandmother. It's here that we're not really sure if she is the real Anastasia or not. I'm fairly certain the real one was proven to be dead. I will admit that the ending was really abrupt. That really could have been handled better. While not one of the best movies ever made, it certainly looks nice with a great performance from Ingrid Bergman. ***

ANATASIA is a warm welcome vehicle for Ingrid Bergman, after her exile in Europe with her then- husband Roberto Rossellini, her first Hollywood feature since 1949, it won her a second Oscar.Directed by Oscar-nominated director Anatole Litvak, the story is loosely based on a historical event, in 1927, Paris, Anna Koreff (Bergman), a woman who is suffering from amnesia and distress, has a remarkable resemblance to the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, who is the youngest daughter of the late Tsar Nicholas II and may have miraculously survived the execution. Anna is coerced by a former Russian General Bounine (Brynner) and company, to impose Anastasia, so as to get an inheritance worth of £10 million. But to achieve that goal, Anna must get the approval from the exile Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna (Hayes), Anastasia's paternal grandmother, who firmly believes Anna is a hired hand like many others before and refuses to dredge up her wretched memories of the monarchy's abdication.Over forty then, it is quite a stretch for Bergman to carry off an allegedly 26-year-old Duchess, but Anastasia's supposedly decade-long trials and tribulations give her a free pass when she appears disheveled, jaded and frail, attempts to drown herself in the Seine. The proper transformation is where Bergman reigns supreme, her star-appeal and royal flair glamorously ignite the screen and she is so in her comfort zone to exude vulnerability while remaining the nuance of regal dignity. It is a standard performance out of her competence, its Oscar reward is an over-achievement.Brynner has a banner year in 1956, a one-two-three punch with THE KING AND I, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and this one, his blunt-talking eloquence and stern countenance mingled with an unspecifiable accent, are competent for a business-orientated mind, but the growing romance between Bounine and Anna, it is too understated to detect. And Helen Hayes, the picture is also a grandiose showcase for the First Lady of the American Theatre, her conversion from steely negation to emotional capitulation is so cliché but her sterling acting is abounding in pathos and reverberations, and upstages everyone else in the cast. Also, Martita Hunt is a flamboyant hoot as Baroness Elena von Livenbaum, the first lady-in-waiting of empress."The party is over, go home!" Empress Marie's imperious remark concluded this identity- discovering mystery with an anti-climatic finish, the thematic revelation (as corny as it is) of falling in love with a person as she is, sounds like a wishful thinking and feels as vague as the true identification of Anna Koreff, which the film cautiously toys with.A typical Hollywood excesses on the production scale, where all the sophistication yields to a simplified open-face romance, ANASTASIA is beguilingly banal and banally beguiling.

I'm right now reading a biography of Ingrid Bergman so I took it upon myself to watch this movie to remind me of her charms. And a better movie I couldn't have chosen. Bergman embodies the well-known role of Anastasia wonderfully, from rags to riches, from a vagabond half-mad to a princess in love. But it's a movie in which all the stars shine, and Yul Brynner blends dignity and resentment well as the fallen Russian general, and Helen Hayes is utterly believable as the exiled Dowager Empress who has lost her daughter and grandchildren to the Russian Revolution. Watching the trio interact is watching art in motion, which may sound melodramatic, but it's how I feel when I'm watching brilliant actors play off each other. When Anastasia and the Dowager Empress come to the realization that she is indeed the lost princess, I was brought to the brink of tears. It came as a surprise to me; I generally don't watch movies that would make me cry and I certainly didn't expect it from this one. Finding an unexpected gem is what makes slogging through piles of crap worthwhile.

Not my favorite Ingrid Bergman movie, although her acting was very good here. Yul Brynner was quite good as the semi-villain who eventually re-orders his priorities. And there is an interesting undertone of the Pygmalion story in this film. The historical inaccuracy is huge, but of course that wasn't the goal of the filmmakers, so that isn't a completely fair criticism. Now that Anastasia Nikolayevna's bones have been found and identified, there isn't that much story here, but of course that wasn't known at the time. The intent was to bring a popular Broadway play to the screen, and although I never saw the play, I suspect that it was a bang-up job.