Starring Kate Winslet, David Kross, and Ralph Fiennes. Rated 18A.

Questions of guilt and complicity are far more important than details about who did what to whom—although those matter, too, in director Stephen Daldry's The Reader, adapted by playwright David Hare from Bernhard Schlink's semiautobiographical novel.

The devil is certainly in the details for young protagonist David Berg, played in the 1950s and '60s by German discovery David Kross, and in the mid '90s by a suitably ruminative Ralph Fiennes.

As a 15-year-old in postwar Germany, David accidentally encounters the much older Hanna (Kate Winslet throughout), who encourages his love of language by having him read to her before boffing his brains out. The boffing has more depth than the literature, as insufficient weight is given to what he happens to read, in German-accented English (as used by the entire cast).

These secret afternoon liaisons sit uncomfortably at school (David barely notices a pretty classmate's interest) and at home, where history hangs over the dinner table like a silent black cloud. After the affair is over, that cloud follows David into law school, where, under the tutelage of Bruno Ganz's eccentric professor, he again encounters Hanna, this time as a greying defendant in a war-crimes trial.

Interlocking secrets-including Hanna's stunted personality, as later revealed-continue to haunt the adult David, now a successful but emotionally closed lawyer in post-unification Berlin.

The film has been criticized as an apologia for Winslet's character, but The Reader is really about the varying levels of resentment felt by David's generation-the same energy that fuelled the violent militancy of the '70s.

By the way, producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack died before the film could be completed. Also, the role of Hanna was at one point given to Nicole Kidman, who was in The Hours (Daldry's previous literary pairing with Hare) but who wasn't available when the shooting started. Fortunately, Winslet was able to apply genuine force to a handsomely crafted tale in which simmering restraint may, for some viewers, obscure the rage that's just below the surface.