Between Kate Winslet and the (as yet) little known David Kross, who shovel coal into the veritable steamship that is "The Reader" and keep it running, full speed ahead.

Kross (who had to turn 18 before he could start filming) throws himself into the role of Michael Berg, a postwar German boy in his mid-teens who enters into a complex, carnal affair with Hannah, a woman 21 years his senior — with fierce abandon and feverish ardor. Winslet, for her part, brings both nuance and a defiant audaciousness to the role of Hannah: a solemn, taciturn woman who works as a tram conductress in Berlin.

One afternoon Michael gets off the tram and collapses in front of her apartment from scarlet fever. She takes him in, nurses him, and winds up sleeping with him. Winslet is mindful of the role she played in "Iris" as the young Iris Murdoch — easily seducing a love-struck virgin and almost without intending to, proceeding to enslave his soul. The only thing she demands from her young lover is that he read to her from his school textbooks ("The Odyssey" alternating with "Lady Chatterley's Lover," among others) before and after making love. Then one day Hannah disappears without warning or explanation, causing Michael to spend much of his youth torturing himself over what he could have done wrong. Still nursing his wounds, he encounters her again eight years later as a law student watching a courtroom trial. She is the defendant, a former SS guard responsible for executing 300 Jews in Auschwitz. As the hearings proceed, Michael realizes he is in possession of evidence that will lighten her sentence (as it is, she's getting life imprisonment) but it will mean exposing himself and their affair before the jury.