The Reader

Daldry's direction the highlight

Marty Nobody (?)

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Stephen Daldry maintains a tight, exemplary, direction of a film which offers a lot with its script but fails to realise its potential.

The key problem being that the middle of the film whets the appetite with some juicy courtroom scenes and lecture theatre postulating, which tempts the viewer to think the movie will seek to analyse that great unanswered question in Holocaust pictures - "why did they?". But instead it veers off into the unsatisfying unspoken, ongoing, romantic entanglement angle.

But just because the scriptwriters bailed out on the better plot line doesn't make this a poor film, as Daldry's work keeps you watching.