The Reader

Kate Winslet and Ralph Finnes star in The Hours director Stephen Daldry's haunting period romance tracing the complicated love affair between a German teen and a mysterious woman twice his age. Based on author Bernhard Schlink's best-selling novel of the same name, The Reader opens in post-World War ...more

The Reader, by the same director (Stephen Daldry) and screenwriter (David Hare) who did The Hours, is one of those lovely but strictly no-laughs literary adaptations loaded with meaningful silences, unresolved moral dilemmas, and long, haunted stares. That's not to say the movie isn't grimly enjoyable, even if its tastefully trashy first half and its morosely serious second feel somewhat disjointed. Ralph Fiennes is Michael, a well-off but elegantly melancholy lawyer living alone in a starkly ...more