It is definitely a Kate Winslet end of the year, as the 33 year old actress will be in cinemas across the nation throughout the winter holidays, starring in two films. “The Reader,” with Ralph Fiennes and David Kross, opens Christmas Day. “Revolutionary Road,” with former James Cameron shipmate, Leonardo DiCaprio as the callow spouse, was directed by Winslet's husband, Sam Mendes, from an adaptation of the Richard Yates novel. It's set for January 2 in Philadelphia.

According to Fox News, Kate Winslet had to give her character in “The Reader” a lot of thought and make substantial research due to the fact that Hanna Schmitz, a tram conductor in 1958 Germany, was illiterate.

“Of course, I’d seen ‘Shoah’ and ‘Schindler’s List’, but I had a lot more to do to get ready . . . I did a lot of reading and talking to people. And I had to focus on my character’s illiteracy,” she said. “No one knows what that’s like, and I knew that was what motivated her. We also had to be careful not to make her sympathetic in any way, but at the same time show she was not a monster. She simply did what she did.”

Directed by Stephen Daldry (“The Hours”) and fussily adapted by David Hare from a slender novel by the German author Bernhard Schlink, “The Reader” is somewhat much more than a plain romance. It has a lot to offer as far as the inner changes are concerned. The movie treads carefully on the issues of loving someone who is a monster and how the second generation in Germany dealt with their parents' complicity with the Holocaust.

Though Winslet does excellent work, there’s something missing there. I couldn’t comprehend her hidden vulnerability from the beginning to the end; therefore the watcher is likely to stop being carried away by her side of the story. We never get more than the merest glimpse of her nature, and have no real understanding of her motivations at any point. Both she and Kross spend much of the movie unclothed, but only he comes across as truly exposed.

Ralph Fiennes has perhaps the toughest job, playing the morose adult Michael, a version, we can assume, of the author. Fiennes masters the default demeanor of someone perpetually pained. Michael supplies her with the books she painfully learns to read during her imprisonment, though he otherwise keeps her at a wary distance. Eventually, she comes to a sad and not entirely predictable ending.

Throughout, "The Reader" has atmosphere, a special kind of gloom of long winters, overcast skies and an accompanying sense of malaise. But as the movie begins, the late-afternoon twilight seems to hide a quality of mystery, even sexual possibility as a teenage boy (that would be David Kross) is suddenly taken ill on a German street. A woman in her 30s (Kate Winslet) sees that he's taken care of, and when the young fellow recovers, months later, he shows up at her apartment to thank her.

And as a final warning: "The Reader" may leave you somewhat frustrated due to its becoming too melodramatic from time to time. When an actor does not know what he is supposed to play, any delicate moment can turn into melodrama.