The Reader might be a heavy-hitting drama, but it's a sexy heavy-hitting drama. The film is based on Bernhard Schlink's award-winning novel and stars Kate Winslet as a woman who finds herself caught up in an affair with a much younger teenage boy (David Kross). Despite their tender connection — he reads to her after they get intimate — things inevitably get complicated when he sees her years later as a defendant in a trial for World War II war crimes.