THE READER

Kate Winslet’s superb performance anchors this adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s bestseller by the director of The Hours. It’s the story of a young student’s affair with a beautiful older woman whose dark past emerges to haunt them both. Though the film, like the book, is concerned with the legacy of guilt inherited by the postwar generation of Germans, its resounding success is as a tragic love story. Its evocation of the powerful connection between the severe, spiritually famished Winslet and the thunderstruck young man (German actor David Kross), who clinches his place in her bed by reading aloud to her, is both raw and tender. Winslet is so intensely moving as the guarded, limited woman who takes fleeting comfort in the arms of a boy that some commentators have been outraged by the film’s apparent sympathy for her morally paralysed character.

“The emotional impact sneaks up on you. The Reader asks tough questions, and, to its credit, provides no easy answers.” — David Ansen, Newsweek