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The Reader by Stephen Daldry
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DVD Cover InformationActor: David Kross, Kate Winslet, Matthias Habich, Ralph Fiennes, Susanne Lothar Director: Stephen Daldry Brand: UNI DIST CORP (MUSIC) Cinematographer: Roger Deakins Cinematographer: Chris Menges Composer: Nico Muhly Editor: Claire Simpson DVD: Region Code 1 Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language); French (Dubbed) Format: Color, Dubbed, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen Running Time: 123 minutes DVD Release Date: 2009-04-14 Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Studio: The Weinstein Company
Movie Reviews of The ReaderMovie Review: Disturbing, emotionally charged film & courtroom drama Summary: 5 StarsThis is an excellent film with superb acting. A boy falls in love with an illiterate woman and she develops a relationship with him in which she has sex with him and he reads poetry and the classic to her. While he falls in love with her, she seems detached from her own life and reality. One day she moves and he cannot find her. His life is shattered. He goes on in adulthood to become a successful lawyer and they meet again in a courtroom where he knows the secret that could save her life (her illiteracy). However, this has been a matter of great shame for her and she prefers to suffer the consequences rather than to admit that she cannot read.
Summary of The ReaderThe 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. 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
Stills from The Reader (Click for larger image)
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