Ralph Fiennes is Michael Berg, the present-day narrator of this film and Bernard Schlink’s novel, a middle-aged German lawyer whom we first encounter making breakfast for a younger bedfellow but refusing to exchange intimacy for commitment. We reconvene in 1958 and 15-year-old Michael (David Kross), a clever child from an academic family, loses his virginity to taciturn Hanna (Kate Winslet), a mysterious, 36-year-old trolleybus worker whom he encounters in the street. He falls in love; she enjoys hearing him read from Tolstoy until she disappears one day without warning. Several years later, Michael, a law student, encounters Hanna in a new context – one that reveals devastating facts about his former lover. A new, unusual relationship emerges, at a distance, and one that stretches over many years. To reveal more would damage the debate at the film’s heart: an argument that pitches feelings against facts and, necessarily, asks more questions than it answers.

The detail is moving, the communication so subtle & expressive, the content uncomfortable and Winslet very deserving of her Oscar performance. ‘The Reader’ is a chewy post-Holocaust work as it pitches itself between the known facts of that cataclysm and the unanswerable questions of responsibility, guilt, law, justice and forgiveness. Overall a troubling and highly provocative movie.