''The Reader''

"The Reader" is an absorbing story of sexual awakening and moral dilemmas. This engrossing, graceful adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's semi-autobiographical novel has been adapted by screenwriter David Hare and director Stephen Daldry with equal parts simplicity and nuance, restraint and emotion. At the center of a skein of vexing ethical questions, Kate Winslet delivers a tough, bravura, Academy Award-winning performance as a woman whose past coincides with Germany's most cataclysmic and hauntingly unresolved era. 

"The Reader" takes place in several eras, but its story begins in 1958, when 15-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross) meets a 36-year-old tram worker named Hanna Schmitz (Best Actress Winslet). The boy develops an almost immediate sexual curiosity about a woman who calls him "kid" and treats him with a gruff, unsentimental approximation of affection. Soon the two have embarked on an affair that, for Michael, represents a sweet, sensuous introduction to sexual life. For Hanna, clearly, the relationship is fraught with deeper and more unsettling issues, hinted at but never fully explained by how she orders Michael to read to her during every liaison and how, finally, she one day disappears.

Devastated, Michael goes on to put his life together, first as a law student and then as a successful attorney in Berlin (Michael is stirringly played as an adult by Ralph Fiennes). Daldry, best known for skillfully adapting the similarly technically challenging novel "The Hours," smoothly moves from Germany in the 1950s and 1960s to the 1980s and 1990s and back, as Michael learns the literally unspeakable truth of Hanna's life, and begins to understand the implications of their affair. As the wrenching mystery of "The Reader" comes to light, the filmmakers gratifyingly avoid histrionics or rank melodrama. It's as if they've taken to heart one of the common-sense pronouncements of Michael's law professors, played by the wonderful Bruno Ganz, who at one point suggests that what people feel or think isn't nearly as important as what they do.