The Reader
Weinstein Company, The | Release Date: December 10, 2008 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
58
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 38 Critic Reviews
Positive:
19
Mixed:
17
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
60
NewsweekDavid Ansen
The Reader can feel stilted and abstract: the film's only flesh-and-blood characters spend half the movie separated. But its emotional impact sneaks up on you. The Reader asks tough questions, and, to its credit, provides no easy answers. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
Provocatively intentioned, The Reader is a movie worth seeing - the kind of film you'll think about for days afterward. But when all is said and done, you're likely to wonder why the impact wasn't greater still. Read full review
60
The New York TimesManohla Dargis
The film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it's about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation. Read full review
60
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
The cast is superb: especially Kate Winslet, who transcends, by far, the limits of her character's narrow soul. Yet The Reader remains schematic, and ultimately reductive. Read full review
60
EmpireKim Newman
The epitome of middle-brow 'quality' drama -- admirable within its limitations, but Bernard Schlink's Oprah Winfrey Book Club-approved book wasn't exactly literature, as this isn't exactly cinema. Read full review
50
VarietyTodd McCarthy
Stephen Daldry's film is sensitively realized and dramatically absorbing, but comes across as an essentially cerebral experience without gut impact. Read full review
50
Village VoiceElla Taylor
Like many narrative filmmakers who walk on their tippy-toes when dealing with the Holocaust, neither Daldry nor Hare seems eager to make the material his own. Read full review
50
SalonStephanie Zacharek
The Reader feels weighty, all right; but it's an unsatisfying kind of weight, and Fiennes' presence, as the grown-up Michael, doesn't help much. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick Groen
So why, despite everyone's best efforts, does all this bigness seem so small and unfocused and simply not up to the task? Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
A film made with high aspirations and more than the usual commitment but one that, after an arresting beginning, changes into a passive rumination. Read full review
50
TimeRichard Schickel
Faithful both to the novel's plot and to its higher aspirations. This is not an entirely good thing. On the other hand -- and somewhat surprisingly -- it is not an entirely bad thing. Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
Can a formidable actress redeem a pile of solemn erotic kitsch? Kate Winslet answers that one as honestly as she can in the film version of Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel "The Reader." Read full review
50
Boston GlobeWesley Morris
After a sensuous introductory act, The Reader descends into a series of dismaying contradictions regarding the moral toxins of the Holocaust - which still pollute postwar Germany. Read full review
50
Baltimore SunChris Kaltenbach
The Reader is ponderously self-important and smugly Socratic, brimming with unfinished sentences and pregnant pauses; if a single character would only say what he thinks, the movie would be over in 30 minutes Read full review
50
TV Guide MagazineJason Buchanan
Whether the source material or Hare's tinkering is to blame for the fact that the story keeps the viewer at arm's length, the end result is still the same: A film that's technically superb, yet still falls short of true greatness. Read full review
40
The New YorkerAnthony Lane
For those who think of cinema as dramatic roughage, The Reader should prove sufficiently indigestible. Read full review
40
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
It appears that the filmmakers have taken Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil" way too literally. Read full review
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