Late into "The Reader," the movie's young German protagonist, Michael Berg (David Kross), visits Auschwitz concentration camp well after the end of WWII. The camera surveys the dreary landscape and finds several giant cages of shoes. It's a scene as superfluous as the movie itself is irksome.

What does Michael hope to discover on this trip? What do the filmmakers? After a sensuous introductory act, "The Reader" descends into a series of dismaying contradictions regarding the moral toxins of the Holocaust -- which still pollute postwar Germany.

Stephen Daldry directed "The Reader" from a script David Hare adapted from Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel, and they've swapped moral purpose for the artsy tastefulness that made their collaboration on "The Hours" such an attractive wallow. But using handsome camerawork, good editing and one of Philip Glass's designer scores to illuminate the inner lives of a bunch of unhappy women is one thing. "The Reader" is a bigger gamble: It leaves the Holocaust at the feet of a generation born just as it was ending. Michael is innocent of his country's crimes. But a kind of guilt stains him nonetheless.

He takes that trip to Auschwitz in the 1960s with a lot on his mind. (Forget that the movie makes it look like a hop and a skip from Germany.) Michael has just discovered that the older woman with whom he once enjoyed an intense summer fling, a streetcar fare-taker named Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), is on trial for war crimes. Hanna was a Nazi prison guard during the war, and the centerpiece of her dirty work involved standing by, with five other women, while a church crammed with 300 Jews burned to nothing. Years later, Michael is a law student in a course taught by Bruno Ganz on German guilt and, as part of the curriculum, he must endure watching his former lover's trial. That he spent all those weeks blissfully unaware of Hanna's past while he read great literature to her makes him one of her victims, too.

Forget whether the survivors of her crimes can bring themselves to forgive her. Can Michael? "The Reader" pivots between Kross' thoughtful performance as the younger man and the character's older self, played by Ralph Fiennes, and the movie is about his reconciliation. The filmmakers might not want us to think of Michael as someone who also survived Hanna, but watching this man vacillate between shame, nostalgia and anger, that thought crossed my mind.

Winslet, meanwhile, suffuses this part with great integrity (and so little German accent), but the film shields her from the horrors of her character's transgressions. It's not a shock to see Winslet in a role like this. There is almost nothing she can't act her way through. But her movie star elegance presents a smoke screen for the character's morality. It feels like a sin not to like her.

So much of a movie is driven by images. What we don't see can often be as powerful as what we do. And what we don't see in "The Reader" -- the feet that walked in all those caged shoes, say -- constitutes a vulgarity of omission. Hearing about Hanna's crimes is not quite the same as watching her commit them. That the criminal in this instance is Winslet demands more than hearsay to convey that this lovely woman could be the perpetrator of any atrocity greater than that Nancy Meyer movie "The Holiday." The filmmakers are comfortable showing Hanna's sexual nudity when, really, we need proof of her moral nakedness. Otherwise, what we're told radically alters the meaning of what we see. Now, it's "The Sorrow and the Pretty."

This, of course, is a matter of taste and tastefulness. The trial acknowledges that the Holocaust was heinous while keeping intact the essential purity of its star. "The Reader" goes even further in building what amounts to a consecration of a war criminal, sentimentalizing something that is beyond sentiment. The trial's outcome hinges on whether Hanna can read. And here the film stages its most galling moral idea -- that the shame of possible illiteracy might outweigh the crime of mass murder.

After we've spent so many scenes watching a repentant old Hanna educate herself with her ex-lover's help, the movie tries a last-minute effort to put its sentimentality in perspective. Michael pays a beseeching visit to one of Hanna's survivors (a cuttingly good Lena Olin), who tells him that the Holocaust was not therapy, despite all evidence here to the contrary. Hanna may be full of apology. But it's unseemly to plead for an audience to accept it.

In a bleak holiday movie season filled with Nazis, the end of the human race, and dysfunctional families, "Bedtime Stories" offers moviegoers a ray of hope. Like a celluloid Tiny Tim, "Bedtime Stories" brings a message of good will.

Opening like a classic fairy tale, "Bedtime Stories" tells of Skeeter Bronson (Adam Sandler), a lovable, underachieving handyman whose dream is to run the Sunny Vista Hotel. The property used to belong to Skeeter's father, who lost it to Barry Nothingham (Richard Griffiths), a British hotel mogul.

This goal seems out of reach until something more impossible happens: While baby-sitting his niece and nephew, Skeeter discovers that for some reason (never explained to the audience), the stories the children make up at night are coming true in his real life.

Naturally, Skeeter tries to manipulate the stories to his benefit. They always end with him running the hotel and dating Mr. Nothingham's Paris Hilton-like daughter, Violet (Teresa Palmer).

There is a catch, of course. Skeeter finds himself at the mercy of his niece and nephew, who don't understand his obsession with the same boring ending. Rather than being superficial, the children constantly push Skeeter toward the girl next door, Jill (Keri Russell), and the path of goodness.

Despite appearing to have a big role in "Bedtime Stories," the children fall victim to the Sandler effect, confined to periodic cameos throughout the movie. Although the supporting cast is filled with comedy pros, including Courteney Cox, Russell Brand and Jonathan Pryce, their characters are poorly developed and underused.

Like other Adam Sandler films, "Bedtime Stories" is all about Adam Sandler. He tries hard to dumb down his humor to suit the younger audience.

For all its shortcomings, "Bedtime Stories" sends an important message (reinforced by the constant background tune of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing"): No matter what setbacks you face, don't stop working for what you believe in.

It's a little sappy and very predictable, but who cares? When the protagonist/good guy wins out in the end, we go home feeling as upbeat as Tiny Tim.

Part of an old Irish toast goes: "May you be half an hour in heaven before the devil knows you're dead."

With "Doubt" that toast might be "May you be half an hour happy in bed before you realize the film you've just seen wasn't as great as you thought."

Sometimes it's the drudgery of film criticism to not leave well enough alone. Most of us love movies so much that we pick apart every film we see. It's in our nature, I guess. Coincidentally, one's nature figures prominently in "Doubt."

"Doubt" will deservedly wind up on many 10-best lists and will most likely garner a gaggle of Oscar nominations.

At first it seems to be an enthralling morality play with superior actors and tense dialogue and well worth your time.

Unfortunately, on a second viewing, the seams begin to show, the performances seem less heady, the profundities not so profound. Its writ-large themes of rigidity of purpose versus progress, moral certitude and questions of faith and sexuality seem more like shooting fish in a barrel.

Any timely parallels to our post-9/11 society become feeble, and the ending feels contrived. "Doubt" wants desperately to manipulate your emotions, and it does so to a point.

Written for the screen and directed by John Patrick Shanley and based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Doubt" is set in a Catholic school in 1964 Bronx, where a stern nun and sensitive priest clash after she accuses him of abusing a student.

Perennial award bait Meryl Streep plays Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the strict disciplinarian principal who begins to question the relationship between Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the school's first black student.

Shanley, whose only other directorial effort was 1990's "Joe Versus the Volcano," has had a spotty career. Mainly a screenwriter, he has been responsible for everything from the superior "Moonstruck" and "Five Corners" to the epic man-monkey love groaner "Congo."

In "Doubt," he has managed to pull off quite the hat trick. His direction is reasonably assured and some of the dialogue is truly electric. Father Flynn's all-too-brief sermons are riveting.

Hoffman, as usual, gives a powerful performance as the progressive Flynn, investing the character with equal parts sensitivity and authority.

Streep's Sister Aloysius is a more prickly matter. There's a fine line between caricature and character, and she barely manages to avoid the edge.

"Doubt" is enriched by more than the two powerhouse leads. Evocative cinematography by Roger Deakins opens up the stagebound proceedings.

When a drama such as "Doubt" comes along, it's manna from heaven for a public starving for "meaningful" films.

"Doubt" is, in the end, a one-note film. How long that note can resonate will be telling, come awards season.