Who's In It: Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Kross, Lena Olin
The Basics: A 15-year-old German boy's sexual initiation with a woman twice his age becomes the source of agony later in his adult life when he discovers that during their brief affair she was a guard in a Nazi concentration camp and personally stood by while hundreds of prisoners burned to death. Then he finds out more secrets she's been keeping, ones that could actually save her from further punishment as a war criminal. And he... oh you think I'm going to spill it here? This movie is enough of a chore to sit through without having a few plot twists to cling to for entertainment.
What's The Deal: One of my favorite episodes of the Ricky Gervais show Extras was the one where Kate Winslet plays herself as a careerist jerk who calculates her own chances of winning an Oscar based on taking on a movie role as a nun or a mentally disabled person. "When's Winslet's going to win?" she says, mocking herself and the industry she's in. And then she turns around and stars in stuff like this, a tasteful, dignified, fussy movie about the distasteful, undignified, unfussy aftermath of the Holocaust. And it's from the guy who made the tasteful, dignified, fussy The Hours, the modern template for an Oscar-grubbing movie if ever one existed.
Why It Will Be Nominated For Awards Anyway: For the very reasons Winslet mocked movies like this on that sitcom. Because it's literary. Because it's about The Holocaust. Because it's got edgy nudity that comes off as "brave" acting. Because someone reads from Goethe and Lady Chatterley's Lover out loud. And because it's got Ralph Fiennes. For just once could he play against type and be un-fancy? Maybe star in the next installment of The Fast and the Furious? Anything, really. Just not more of this.
What About Winslet? She's great. She's always great. Even in boring, airless movies like this. You get that she's tough and no-nonsense and that eventually she will win her Oscar. You just hope that she's not playing a nun or a Nazi when it happens.
When To Stifle Your Laughter:When the old-age makeup gets put on Lena Olin and Winslet. Seriously, it's like someone blew baby powder into a wig for a high school production of Our Town.