The Reader

“Behind the mystery lies a truth that will make you question everything you know.”

Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) is a German lawyer who carries a summer from 1958, when he was fifteen and spent it with Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), an older woman who vanished without a word. Stephen Daldry follows the years after, then a war crimes trial in which Hanna stands among the defendants. Michael sits in the gallery and sees that she cannot read, a secret she is guarding at the cost of her freedom, and it leaves him with a choice he never asked for.