YMMV / The Reader

• Audience-Alienating Premise: As described here, the film invites the viewer to sympathise with a former concentration camp guard who was complicit in the murder of three hundred Jewish women (and the director avoided showing that scene so that the audience wouldn't have an "unbalanced" view of her). It also portrays an affair between said woman and a sixteen-year-old with gratuitous nudity from both (and the Squicky behind the scenes note that the filmmakers waited until the actor turned eighteen so they could legally film him nude).
• Award Snub: The film didn't win the Academy Award for Best Picture, but fans of other films were very vocal that it got a nomination in favour of them.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Nowadays, the Holocaust narrative of the film often comes second to the detail that it's a film where a thirtysomething has an affair with a 15-year-old.
• Broken Aesop:
  • The film's take on Michael and Hanna's relationship is that it was borderline abusive and very wrong. Yet the scenes of the affair revel in Fanservicey shots of nude Kate Winslet, and the statutory rapist is presented as merely a complicated person, as opposed to a predatory adult taking advantage of a minor.
• Consolation Award: By the time 2009 rolled around, Kate Winslet had been nominated six times and had yet to win an Academy Award. What makes people believe that this occurred is that she won Best Actress, even though she won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for the same role. Interestingly, she also won Best Lead Actress at the Golden Globes that year, but for Revolutionary Road. Many people believed that she deserved to win for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as well as Revolutionary Road, Titanic (1997), Sense and Sensibility and Little Children.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Kate Winslet's appearance in Extras was, at best, very prophetic:
  "I don't think we really need another film about the Holocaust, do we? It's like, how many have there been, you know? We get it. It was grim. Move on. No, I'm doing it because I've noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust you're guaranteed an Oscar."
  • Ricky Gervais pointed this out at the Golden Globes that year. "Well done Winslet, I told ya, do a Holocaust movie, the awards come, didn't I?" The actress was then seen laughing her head off.
• Just Here for Godzilla: For some, Kate Winslet's performance (though agreed to not be as good as some of her others) is the sole reason to watch the film.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: This film might better be remembered as the one that fans of The Dark Knight and Wall-E claimed they were snubbed in favor of, due to the typical aggressive campaigning efforts of Harvey Weinstein. This would prompt the Academy to expand the Best Picture nominations to a maximum of ten films as a result.
• Spiritual Successor: Can be seen as a 2000s version of The Night Porter; both films portray a doomed romance between a Nazi war criminal and their much younger lover in post-war Germany, although this film reverses the genders.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The fact that Hanna took advantage of an ill sixteen-year-old boy makes a lot of people refuse to give her any sympathy. Oh, and the whole thing about her being complicit in the death of several hundred Jewish women.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The make-up used to age Kate Winslet about forty years is quite impressive.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: Hanna's inability to read is a rather transparent metaphor for the inability of her generation to see the evil of the Nazis at the time it was occurring; not incidentally, it's by learning to read that she becomes fully aware of the enormity of the Holocaust.

---