Reviews

Review: The Reader

Tiresome and callow

By PETER KEOUGH | January 9, 2009

2.5 Stars

VIDEO: The trailer for The Reader

It's Christmas, and our thoughts turn toward the Third Reich. Or so it would seem from the films being released for the holiday: two deal directly with the subject and The Spirit offers a tasteless Nazi sequence.

Of the three, this adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's bestseller ponders the deepest issues — e.g. (spoiler), how should a kid feel after he finds out that the older babe he slept with is a war criminal? Stephen Daldry complicates matters with a tiresome frame story set in the future as old Michael (Ralph Fiennes) looks back at his 15-year-old self (David Kross) getting it on with tram conductor Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), or reading to her, or putting up with her tantrums.

Who knew she'd turn out to be a she-devil of the SS and too dumb to defend herself at her trial? The film lingers more on Winslet's nudity than on the nature of guilt, and it offers no reason to care for the lumpen criminal or the callow lover.

Review: The Kindly Ones
Those put off by the soft-pedaling of the SS in the movie adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader might be wary of Jonathan Littell's memoir of fictional war criminal Maximilien Aue.
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Review: The Hurt Locker
Now that the troops are pulling out and the war no longer haunts the headlines, maybe people will want to see a film about Iraq — especially since it's one of the best war movies ever made.
Review: Clash of the Titans
It takes a lot of movie magic to reduce some 3000 years of mythology to piffle. After watching this farrago produced by state-of-the-art 3-D and CGI, I’m all for the return of the oral tradition.
Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One
When a movie begins with the Warner Bros. logo crumbling in decay and ends with a defiled grave, you know you've experienced an evening of magic.
Review: Carnage
As befits someone with jail time hanging over his head, Roman Polanski does his best work in close quarters. From Knife in the Water , to Repulsion , to The Tenant and The Pianist , he's a master of claustrophobic close encounters, and as such has a good time adapting Yasmin Reza's play, God of Carnage .
Review: Harlan — In The Shadow Of 'Jud Süß'
The story of Veit Harlan, the director of the Third Reich’s most notorious anti-Semitic film, still provokes and fascinates.
Review: Paris 36
Director Christophe Barratier (Les Choristes) co-wrote this nostalgic paean to 1930s Paris and the stage musical.
Review: North Face
Nazi queen Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light (1932) was only one example of a peculiar, culturally specific German genre known as "mountain films."
Jewishfilm.2010
They aren’t the most auspicious of couplings: an Arab and Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied Tunis in 1942; a butcher and his apprentice in Haredi Jerusalem; the survivor of a terrorist bombing and a stranger who might be a guardian angel.
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