Dan1863Sickles Imagine THE DIARY OF ANN FRANK if it had been filmed as a classic crime film starring Jimmy Cagney. This is a movie that turns all the well-meaning Holocaust clichés on their head. The story is simple. Late in the war, bankrupt Nazis desperately attempt to counterfeit Allied money on a massive scale, using a mismatched team of imprisoned Jews and hardened career criminals as skilled craftsmen. Most of the prisoners object, but their leader is almost chillingly willing to adapt. But there's more to his betrayal than meets the eye! The cynical, amoral anti-hero Solly is so completely selfish and so completely focused on his own survival that his own private journey through hell comes across as classic tough-guy drama rather than moral uplift. Yet at the end the brilliant forger discovers his conscience and finds a way to outwit the Nazis after all. A Holocaust movie for everyone who hated SCHINDLER'S LIST but loved THE MALTESE FALCON and THE PUBLIC ENEMY.

paul2001sw-1 Can you be a hero in a concentration camp? Those who survived against near impossible odds in world war did so mostly by being useful to the Nazis. And, on the other side of the fence, can you be a guard and a decent man? On one hand, you are participating in a system of utmost barbarity; and in that milieu, anything short of pure psychopathy might seem like kindness. Can this have any meaning? 'The Counterfeiters' is a classy drama, and true story, about a Jewish forger who made false money to help the Nazis pay for the war; and whose cautious efforts at sabotage certainly feel heroic from the vantage point of a modern armchair. Yet when the camp is liberated, the well-fed highly-skilled forging team seem almost indistinguishable from their former captors in the eyes of their fellow inmates from the less privileged barracks. Many stories about the holocaust chose to address the evil of what happened tangentially, and this tale is no exception: there's a limit to the number of bodies any viewer can bear counting without becoming numb. But 'The Counterfeiters' is both thought provoking and entertaining (in a grim sort of way); and leaves you wanting to know more about its subject.

vostf I perfectly know that a Foreign Academy Award is indication a movie has great production values, but maybe nothing more. The people entitled to vote for this award make the winner a reflection of themselves: somewhat pedantic with a slight touch of low-key stock sentimentalism. Ah, and based-on-a-true-storism is great for both pedantic and sentimentalist easy-flowing images.I should have know better. Yet another movie about concentration camps, and a Hollywood-sunshine approved one! Well, I had been learning some fascinating facts about Operation Bernhard in recent years and I thought this movie would offer a tremendous depiction of it. I haven't read the book - which is not widely available in English - and it seems it wasn't the most interesting way to make an exciting movie about Operation Bernhard.Wonder why the movie barely fills a 90-minute spot? Because it has very little stuff to tell. It pales in comparison with the most emotionally powerful PoW/concentration camps movies, and it pales in comparison with the breathtaking suspense of the best documentaries describing Operation Bernhard.IMO the "rest of the world Oscar" and the Operation Bernhard premise don't count among the good reasons to watch Die Fälscher.

Movie_Muse_Reviews The Holocaust has been revisited in film so many times that I imagine the first thing German-born film actors ask themselves upon meeting is "which film(s) were you a Nazi in?" The crimes of the Nazi Party and the German soldiers carrying out its mission to revive Germany through the mass killing of Jews and other "invalids" are so unfathomable and powerful that filmmakers and storytellers can't help but find so many ways to tell complex stories of morality and human survival."The Counterfeiters" is another one of these films, but lack of originality is absolutely the only knock against it."Counterfeiters" focuses on a group of Jews assembled by the Nazis to create mass quantities of Ally currency to be used to decimate Ally economies. It's the same type of lens on the Holocaust, but a different "edition" so to speak. Yet the script is immaculate, the drama understated and effective, the plot completely engaging, and best of all: it's a Holocaust film under two hours -- and a great one at that. It begins with a morally complex main character, the crooked-faced Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), who before the war was a professional counterfeiter, one with considerable artistic talent who chose the more "financially sound" career. Simply put, he's a criminal and the crimes of the Holocaust manage to make us sympathetic to him. He's an honest criminal, but a criminal no less. As the leader of his counterfeiting team in a way, following his point of view is extremely interesting. There is his survival instinct, his pride over the work even though it's helping the Nazis and characters such as his friend Burger the printer (Adolf Burger, who wrote the book the film is based on), who pressures him not to do the work and risk death on principle.These are all familiar Holocaust film themes. There are the Jews who will do anything to stay alive, helping the Nazis or doing whatever they bid for an extra scrap of food and soft beds and those who would be willing martyrs, dying before they stoop to a certain level or help a Nazi.The difference is in the execution. Stefan Ruzowitzky has done an incredible job adapting Burger's incredible true account. He's identified the key moments and turning points and crafted ideal scenes to help build the plot up. He wastes no time getting to the point. The scenes are short and sweet, giving us bursts of information, emotion and symbolism, sometimes in just a minute. Directing off his own script, he directs us to key visuals that convey all that information like a leftover piece of food that conveys the hunger not always at the forefront of a scene. The pacing is exceptional, especially for a Holocaust film, and though some of the scenes are brutal it doesn't hit the audience over the head with scenes of terror and emotion that go straight for the heartstrings. It's much more subtle and effectively so.It's hard to visit yet another Holocaust film, but "The Counterfeiters" is worth it because of Ruzowitzky's fine craftsmanship and its overall subtly. It's the impact of a Holocaust film without all the emotionally distressful scenes and the screaming and the heartfelt violin music. The unique story of Sorowtisch and these group of Jews who are given a bit more privilege yet in turn forced to wrestle with a bit of moral guilt makes it a warranted trip into a oft-visited historical genre.~Steven CVisit my site http://moviemusereviews.com