The Thousands

Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) is a Berlin lawyer who as a post-WWII 15-year-old (hottie German newcomer David Kross) had an affair with the much older Hanna (a frowning, frequently nude Kate Winslet), who loved to be read to. Later, Michael discovers at a war crimes tribunal that Hanna was an Auschwitz guard who made Jews read to her before letting them die horribly in a burning church.

This pompous, confused film is all the more disappointing for its heavy-hitting makers: screenwriter David Hare, director Stephen Daldry, and actors Winslet and Fiennes. It self-consciously tackles Big Issues, but fumbles them in a banal and deeply offensive way. It idealises Hanna’s reading, yet the spoken-word fetish that melds sex, literature and death is her most repugnant attribute.

The Reader is nominally about German Holocaust guilt, but it’s more about how statutory rape by an unrepentant, manipulative sociopath can really f!#k a dude up. Is The Reader suggesting that Nazism was like child abuse? And is it really suggesting that illiteracy is a greater evil than mass murder? The Reader is deeply flawed because it never answers these questions.