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CHARLES LINDBERGH Award-winning biographer A. Scott Berg (Max Perkins, Goldwyn) was granted total access to the aviator's vast archives. Berg's Lindbergh portrays the private man behind the public legend.
RUDOLF NUREYEV The Russian dancer's 1961 defection from the U.S.S.R. to the U.S. made headlines. In Nureyev, author Diane Solway looks at his glittering career onstage and his fascinating life behind the scenes.
ANNE FRANK What is there to know about her that she didn't tell us in her famous Diary? A good deal, according to journalist Melissa Muller, whose Anne Frank fills in, through interviews and research, the young diarist's world.
RONALD REAGAN Edmund Morris (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt) has spent 13 years on Dutch, his account of another Republican President.
IAN MCKELLEN Apt Pupil; Gods and Monsters
Why: To the ordinary moviegoer, Richard II and Richard III might be obscure sequels to Oliver Stone's Nixon biopic. But theater lovers know them as showcases for definitive roles--the stunted man of thought, the malefic man of action--played by Ian McKellen, the prime Shakespearean actor of our time. Now, with leading roles in two ambitious thrillers, Sir Ian, 59, must face the inconvenience of movie stardom. In Gods and Monsters, he is James Whale, the director of Frankenstein, who in his last days seeks a young man to ease his roiling soul. In the Stephen King tale Apt Pupil, he plays an aged Nazi, living incognito in California, who is forced into an uneasy alliance with a curious teenager. McKellen is the soul of pained grace in one film, the spirit of caged evil in the other; but both reveal an actor totally at ease with the camera's stare. Forget, for a second, the march of teen thesps from the WB to the big screen. Ian McKellen is a star of the future. When: Gods and Monsters at the New York Film Festival, then in theaters Nov. 4; Apt Pupil, Oct. 9.
MY MOTHER THE SLAVE, MY BROTHER THE SKINHEAD How did Tolstoy put it? All happy families are on TV; all unhappy families are in movies. In autumn movies, anyway. Here's a six-pack of serioso films that bend the laws of relativity.
BELOVED Jonathan Demme directs Toni Morrison's story of a former slave (Oprah Winfrey) and her brooding brood.
A SIMPLE PLAN A wad of hot money tests the brotherly love of Billy Bob Thornton and Bill Paxton. Director: Sam Raimi.
ONE TRUE THING Renee Zellweger tends ailing mom Meryl Streep in a merciful drama from Carl Franklin.
A SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER An eccentric American family in Paris: Kris Kristofferson stars for director James Ivory.
AMERICAN HISTORY X Two brothers (Edward Furlong, Edward Norton) flirt with neo-Nazism. Tony Kaye directs.
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL Roberto Benigni's prizewinning tragicomedy of an Italian Jew and his son in a Nazi death camp.
KERI RUSSELL Felicity