"THE READER" - Kate Winslet turns in an Oscar-winning performance as an illiterate train conductor during pre-World War Two Berlin who helps out a teenager and later seduces the besotted young student. Their short, passionate affair ends abruptly when she disappears. 

After the war when he was a law student, he finds out to his horror that she had obtained new employment as a guard at a Nazi prison camp. Agonizing during the postwar trial of her and her fellow female concentration camp guards for war crimes because he has information that could excuse her from some of the culpability, the story moves into a dreary exposé of lives lost among the living as well as the horrible tragedy of those lost because of the Nazi atrocities. 

Winslet does a nice job creating some sympathy for an amoral monster, but the story ends up severely hampered because both characters are poorly developed. Ralph Fiennes plays the student as an adult with only a daughter to dote on after a lost family and a failed marriage. (B+, See it)