However, I have been struggling with the placement of The Reader for some time. I have the same conundrum with the film as I did with the book back in 2003. The plot about Hanna’s struggle with illiteracy and how her young lover Michael deals with that is the best part of the story for me. It’s the stuff of an Old Hollywood melodrama that is unapologetic in its earnestness. This aspect of the film is why The Reader gets a modest pass onto the list. It is the Holocaust aspect feels like a real stretch for me here.

For a more successful look at how the shame of illiteracy can drive someone to violence, I highly recommend Claude Chabrol’s near-masterpiece La Cérémonie (1995) that stars Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire. The novel A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell, which the film is based on, begins with this sentence: “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.”

As good as Kate Winslet was in The Reader, I still wish she had won for her raw performance as April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road. That look she gives her husband just before the curtains close on her disastrous dress rehearsal was all that was needed to convey what Yates took three (very enjoyable) pages to do.

how come you didn’t mention Vicky Christina Barcelona? i don’t preferably liked that movie’s story, but it had some great shots of Spain.. relatable to The Fall

and you forgot The Reader !! but you put definitely, maybe?!?! comeon! ha jk.. anyway the Reader is such a good movie, it was so sad and powerful–tragic that she would of lived if she admitted that she was illiterate– (i was in Germany when i saw that movie) …it was kind of disturbing that she was his mother’s age .. but other than that .. it was a good story