Review: Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Reviews

Review: The Reader

Tiresome and callow

By PETER KEOUGH | January 9, 2009

2.5 Stars

VIDEO: The trailer for The Reader

It's Christmas, and our thoughts turn toward the Third Reich. Or so it would seem from the films being released for the holiday: two deal directly with the subject and The Spirit offers a tasteless Nazi sequence.

Of the three, this adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's bestseller ponders the deepest issues — e.g. (spoiler), how should a kid feel after he finds out that the older babe he slept with is a war criminal? Stephen Daldry complicates matters with a tiresome frame story set in the future as old Michael (Ralph Fiennes) looks back at his 15-year-old self (David Kross) getting it on with tram conductor Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), or reading to her, or putting up with her tantrums.

Who knew she'd turn out to be a she-devil of the SS and too dumb to defend herself at her trial? The film lingers more on Winslet's nudity than on the nature of guilt, and it offers no reason to care for the lumpen criminal or the callow lover.

Review: The Kindly Ones
Those put off by the soft-pedaling of the SS in the movie adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader might be wary of Jonathan Littell's memoir of fictional war criminal Maximilien Aue.
Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
For teenagers, everything seems like the end of the world: popularity, school, love, family, treacherous conspiracies, the war between good and evil wizards.
Oscar predictions: Liberal gilt
It's like a fairy tale for Hollywood liberals.
Review: The Hurt Locker
Now that the troops are pulling out and the war no longer haunts the headlines, maybe people will want to see a film about Iraq — especially since it's one of the best war movies ever made.
Review: Clash of the Titans
It takes a lot of movie magic to reduce some 3000 years of mythology to piffle. After watching this farrago produced by state-of-the-art 3-D and CGI, I’m all for the return of the oral tradition.
Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One
When a movie begins with the Warner Bros. logo crumbling in decay and ends with a defiled grave, you know you've experienced an evening of magic.
Review: The Wrath of the Titans
The folks who gave us the bombastic 3D remake of Clash of the Titans unleash Jonathan Liebesman's Wrath , and it's sensational — if you like being stuffed into a trash can and rolled down a hill.
Review: Coriolanus
In a line of fascist-style stagings of the Bard from Orson Welles's 1937 black-shirted Julius Caesar to Richard Loncraine's brown-shirted Richard III (1998), Ralph Fiennes sets his lean and hungry take on Shakespeare's tragedy in a mo dern-day war zone, paring the play to a brisk two hours.
Review: Carnage
As befits someone with jail time hanging over his head, Roman Polanski does his best work in close quarters. From Knife in the Water , to Repulsion , to The Tenant and The Pianist , he's a master of claustrophobic close encounters, and as such has a good time adapting Yasmin Reza's play, God of Carnage .
Review: Harlan — In The Shadow Of 'Jud Süß'
The story of Veit Harlan, the director of the Third Reich’s most notorious anti-Semitic film, still provokes and fascinates.
Review: Paris 36
Director Christophe Barratier (Les Choristes) co-wrote this nostalgic paean to 1930s Paris and the stage musical.
Less

Topics: Reviews , Culture and Lifestyle, Nazi Party, History, More

| More

Most Popular

The Current Issue

Table of Contents

Cover Archive

Masthead | Authors | Contact us

Blogs

[live review] Rabbit Rabbit at the Regattabar
On The Download | October 18, 2012 at 7:37 PM

[Q&A] Diplo on Major Lazer, staying punk and playing Luke Skywalker to EDM's Death Star
October 18, 2012 at 5:11 PM

"A climate of fear": Officials respond to the BU campus crimewave, concerns about racial profiling
Phlog | October 18, 2012 at 11:15 AM

Pics & Quips: Hofstra Debate Protests Short On Guidos, Full of LaRouchebags, Obama Fluffers & Hippie Evangelicals
October 17, 2012 at 2:11 PM

Mind The Binder
Talking Politics | October 16, 2012 at 10:46 PM

ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH

REVIEW: WUTHERING HEIGHTS [2012] | October 18, 2012
Merchant-Ivory this is not. Nor is it any Emily Brontë we've seen before.

INTERVIEW: ANDREA ARNOLD'S ROMANTIC REALISM | October 18, 2012
People in love do crazy things, especially in Andrea Arnold's films. So adapting Emily Brontë's masterpiece of pathological love, Wuthering Heights , came naturally.

REVIEW: SISTER | October 18, 2012
Increasingly popular among American independent filmmakers, the school of miserabilism — starkly dramatizing the poor, wretched, and unjustly deprived — has thrived in Europe.

REVIEW: GIRL MODEL | October 10, 2012
As seen in David Redmon and Ashley Sabin's somber, sometimes poetic, Fred Wiseman-like documentary, the international model trade ranks just above human trafficking in legitimacy.

REVIEW: WAKE IN FRIGHT (1971) | October 10, 2012
Combining elements of Heart of Darkness , After Hours , and Groundhog Day , Ted Kotcheff's brutally brilliant Outback thriller follows the moral degradation, or perhaps redemption, of a snooty schoolteacher (Gary Bond) traveling from the backwater where he's assigned to Sydney for his Christmas vacation.