Conspiracy, HBO, May 19, 9 p.m. E.T.;

By James Poniewozik

Two inadvertent bookends explore the Holocaust from its deceptively mundane beginning to a heretofore unstaged end. Conspiracy re-enacts the 90-minute meeting in which silky-voiced SS bureaucrat Reinhard Heydrich (Kenneth Branagh) gently bullies a roomful of Nazi functionaries into accepting the Final Solution as a fait accompli. A bloodless yet brutal testament to the violence of euphemism and groupthink--eerily indistinguishable from any middle managers' meeting--it is the banality of evil brought unignorably to life.

Night One of Anne Frank, based on Melissa Muller's 1998 biography, is a familiar depiction of the beloved diarist and her family's life in the secret annex. But on Night Two, following Frank (Hannah Taylor Gordon) into Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, it becomes a different film. These scenes, unflinching and almost without dialogue (the Nazis strip Anne of her clothes, her hair and her indomitable spirit), make a hard-to-take but overdue answer to the easy optimism of past Diary productions.

--By James Poniewozik