The Reader, round 1.

"During the making of The Reader, producers Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella passed away," writes the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt. "This last film is a testament to the kind of productions each was associated with in his career."

"German author Bernhard Schlink's succinct, widely admired 1995 novel, which parts company with most Holocaust literature by placing a perpetrator, not a victim, at the story's center, uses a late-1950s affair between a former concentration camp guard and a teenager half her age to explore both generations' difficulty in coming to terms with German war guilt," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Stephen Daldry's film is sensitively realized and dramatically absorbing, but comes across as an essentially cerebral experience without gut impact."

"In a season full of stories about life under The Third Reich (Valkyrie, Defiance, Good), The Reader is the most meaningful, in that it looks at the legacy of Nazi evil on the next generation of Germans," finds Screen's Mike Goodridge. "Schlink's provocative story becomes an analogy for all Germans as they struggled - and indeed still struggle - to balance the shame at their parents' actions and complicity with notions of love, understanding and forgiveness."

In the Telegraph, Marc Lee speculates as to how Kate Winslet might fare in this year's Oscar race.

Posted by dwhudson at December 1, 2008 12:54 AM