Kate Winslet Movie:

		List Price: $19.95		Label: The Weinstein Company Salesrank: 1866 Released: April 14, 2009
		Our Price: $10.89
		Used Price: $6.31
		MPAA Rating: R (Restricted) Media: DVD

Editorial Review:
The Reader, set in post-WWII Germany, follows teenager Michael Berg as he engages in a passionate but secretive affair with an older woman named Hanna. Eight years after Hanna s disappearance, Michael is stunned to discover her again as she stands on trial for Nazi war crimes. The Reader is a haunting story about truth and reconciliation and how one generation comes to terms with the crimes of another. Kate Winslet won and Academy Award and a Golden Globe for her performance.

Description of The Reader:
What is the nature of guilt--and how can the human spirit survive when confronted with deep and horrifying truths? The Reader, a hushed and haunting meditation on these knotty questions, is sorrowful and shocking, yet leavened by a deep love story that is its heart. In postwar Germany, young schoolboy Michael (German actor David Cross) meets and begins a tender romance with the older, mysterious Hanna (Kate Winslet, whose performance is a revelation). The two make love hungrily in Hanna's shabby apartment, yet their true intimacy comes as Michael reads aloud to Hanna in bed, from his school assignments, textbooks, even comic books. Hanna delights in the readings, and Michael delights in Hanna.

Years later, the two cross paths again, and Michael (played as an adult by Ralph Fiennes) learns, slowly, horrifyingly, of acts that Hanna may have been involved in during the war. There is a war crimes trial, and the accused at one point asks the panel of prosecutors: "Well, what would you have done?" It is that question--as one German professor says later: "How can the next generation of Germans come to terms with the Holocaust?"--that is both heartbreaking and unanswerable. Winslet plays every shade of gray in her portrayal of Hanna, and Fiennes is riveting as the man who must rewrite history--his own and his country's--as he learns daily, hourly, of deeds that defy categorization, and morality. "No matter how much washing and scrubbing," one character says matter of factly, "some sins don't wash away." The Reader (with nods to similar films like Sophie's Choice and The English Patient dares to present that unnerving premise, without offering an easy solution. --A.T. Hurley

The Reader Reviews:
very good
2009-10-13 - it was a movie in which you could not help but think about it and analyze it for a couple of days.

Blah Oscar-bait
2009-10-11 - The Bottom Line:

A decent film for its first two-thirds despite Kate Winslet's occasionally laughable accent, The Reader's lamentable third act turns what could have been a moderately-insightful film about German post-WWII guilt into a middling piece of Oscar-bait with a phoned-in performance by Ralph Fiennes and a whole bunch of contrived, artificial scenes; even in the weak year that was 2008 in film the idea that this middlebrow piece of filmmaking got a Best Picture and Director nomination is ridiculous.

2.5/4

Warning: This Review Contains Adult Content
2009-10-08 - Warning: this review contains adult content. But that's okay, because you really can't get a grip on the Holocaust until you've had a gynecologist's eye view of Kate Winslet's privates.

"The Reader" is pretentious cheese. It isn't honest enough to be straightforward soft-core coming-of-age porn, or to be a hard-hitting, revelatory Holocaust movie. Rather, it's a clunky and silly film that attempts to graft the one onto the other and succeeds at neither. "The Reader" brings the viewer in, and then teases him, with a half hour of almost uninterrupted simulated bodily functions, combined with nude bathing. It's all a great big, high school literature class metaphor about the washing off of guilt, dontcha know. Then "The Reader" devotes its remaining hours to scenes of well-dressed, attractive young Germans sitting around asking and declaring, "Who's guilty? Aren't all our parents guilty? I hate my parents." Overlaying every boring, banal, scene and vapid line of dialogue with ponderous, self-important gas, "The Reader" ultimately succeeds at neither serious discussion nor eroticism.

From top to bottom, the cast is first rate. David Kross is achingly poignant as teenager Michael Berg, who, in the 1950s, loses his virginity in an affair with Hanna Schmitz, a 36-year-old, former SS concentration camp guard. Kross is both intimately human and vulnerable and also larger than life and every bit the compelling, big screen movie star. In that he reminds the viewer of the young Peter O'Toole. May Kross have a long and bountiful career.

In the "deleted scenes" reel on the DVD, there are three fine scenes that could have served as centers of three fine movies. In the most gripping, Thomas Thieme is a truck driver who gives Kross a ride on a backwoods road where a large horse is transporting logs. Thieme is repulsive, so terrifying, and also clearly human and in need of understanding. In another deleted scene, in a conversation with his professor (the always brilliant Bruno Ganz) an attractive German boy admits that his father was an SS guard. In a third deleted scene, a prisoner painstakingly learns to read in a prison cell. That these three fabulous scenes were deleted, while endless scenes of nude bathing were kept, informs you of the filmmakers' eye on the box office.

In the DVD commentary, the film's director Stephen Daldry, CBE (Commander of the British Empire), script writer David Hare, and novelist Bernhard Schlink smugly pat themselves on the back. Wearing professorial clothing, tweeds and nubbly sweaters, these graying white men express how mah-velous, perfectly mah-velous it is that they've made such a big, fat, profound film that will finally get people to engage in some serious thought about the Holocaust. Significantly, they never mention a single other of the, by now, millions of works of art that got to the topic before they did, nor do they ever address their pimping out Kate Winslet's privates to make their contribution to the body of Holocaust lit stand out.

Check out online discussions of "The Reader." Most threads are devoted to such deep and heavy topics as clinically detailed examinations of the tautness and firmness, pendulousness or sag of Kate Winslet's privates, the straightness or curvature and length of David Kross', the specific acts that the characters engage in, and what bodily orifices are employed.

This review is not a protest against erotica; it's a protest against BS. This review isn't even a protest against the disturbingly burgeoning subgenre of Holocaust porn. In fact there is a brilliant, scathing, unforgettable scene in "Schindler's List" where Nazi concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) menaces his Jewish slave, Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz) as she bathes in a cramped basement. That scene is so powerful and unforgettable because it has two things "The Reader" completely lacks: psychological insight - the viewer knows exactly who Goeth and Hirsch are and what their relationship is to each other, and, thus, complexity and depth, and stylistic sophistication - Goeth does all the talking. He imagines Helen's replies.

Look, there is worthy art out there about the Holocaust. Read Elie Wiesel's "Night," Borowski's "This Way to the Gas;" Rufeisen's "In the Lion's Den," see "Schindler's List," "Europa Europa," "The Gray Zone," "Shoah," or "The Shop on Main Street." There's also really good soft-core porn out there, much of it free on the internet. "The Reader" gains nothing, and says nothing, in its pretentious, but commercially shrewd, attempt to combine the two genres.


"The reader meets kate's breasts"
2009-09-19 - Vastly over-rated oscar hyped movie. Largely nothing happens during this movie.
The first half-hour is kate and the kid in bed with about 30 shots of her breasts.
Then there is a drawn out court process with little complexity or intrigue. The central question of law vs. moral responsibility in the concentration camp is interesting, although meekly explored. Pretty dull movie that doesn't cover any new ground. Over...rated Saying that, Kate does give a strong performance.

Very monotonous...
2009-09-16 - The movie is quite boring to watch. The actors are great, but the whole thing is made in this monotonous mode which makes you fall asleep.