The best Holger Handtke’s drama movies

A Russian and a German sniper play a game of cat-and-mouse during the Battle of Stalingrad in WWII.

Based on the true story of the greatest treasure hunt in history, The Monuments Men is an action drama focusing on seven over-the-hill, out-of-shape museum directors, artists, architects, curators, and art historians who went to the front lines of WWII to rescue the world’s artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves and return them to their rightful owners. With the art hidden behind enemy lines, how could these guys hope to succeed?

Europe 1990, the Berlin wall has just crumbled: Katrine, raised in East Germany, but now living in Norway for the last 20 years, is a “war child”; the result of a love relationship between a Norwegian woman and a German occupation soldier during World War II. She enjoys a happy family life with her mother, her husband, daughter and granddaughter. But when a lawyer asks her and her mother to witness in a trial against the Norwegian state on behalf of the war children, she resists. Gradually, a web of concealments and secrets is unveiled, until Katrine is finally stripped of everything, and her loved ones are forced to take a stand: What carries more weight, the life they have lived together, or the lie it is based on?

Berlin in June of 1940. While Nazi propaganda celebrates the regime’s victory over France, a kitchen-cum-living room in Prenzlauer Berg is filled with grief. Anna and Otto Quangel’s son has been killed at the front. This working class couple had long believed in the ‘Führer’ and followed him willingly, but now they realise that his promises are nothing but lies and deceit. They begin writing postcards as a form of resistance and in a bid to raise awareness: Stop the war machine! Kill Hitler! Putting their lives at risk, they distribute these cards in the entrances of tenement buildings and in stairwells. But the SS and the Gestapo are soon onto them, and even their neighbours pose a threat.

A posthumous look at the last days of Guenther's life as he, his best friend, and his sister let loose on a four-day binge of alcohol, drugs, and sex.

In 1938 Hans Zeisig, an apolitical comedian, impersonator and cabaret actor, flees with a Russian passport (instead of American, which he would have preferred) from Nazi-Berlin, and finds himself in the legendary Hotel Lux, the 'lost paradise' of the Comintern, in Moscow. Everyone believes that Zeisig is a man named Hansen, Hitler's personal astrologer. But Zeisig quickly realizes that he's gone from the frying pan into the fire. In the Hotel Lux he meets his friends Frida and later Meyer again, still passionate communists. For the three idealists an adventure between love and death begins to run his course.

A "romantic comedy" based loosely on the suicide of the poet Henrich von Kleist in 1811.

While World War One is coming to an end, the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert is trying to maintain political stability in Berlin. In the haughty Prince Max of Baden he finds an ally who offers him government participation under his chancellorship. In the meantime, discontent with the monarchy is steadily increasing in the last days of the war, but Emperor Wilhelm II remains steadfast in his throne.

Based on the true story that shocked a nation in the summer of 1988 and revealed the scandalizing amount of errors committed by the media and the police in a half-baked attempt to rescue hostages.

The film tells the early life story of Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who was born in Wloclawek, Poland in 1920. During the Third Reich, the family was in great danger. Nevertheless, he returned to Germany with his wife.