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The Counterfeiters(Die Fälscher)

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Austria, Germany · 2007
Rated R · 1h 38m
Director Stefan Ruzowitzky
Starring Karl Markovics, August Diehl, Devid Striesow, Martin Brambach
Genre Drama, War

Jewish counterfeiter Salomon Sorowitsch uses his artistic talents for more nefarious means, filling his days with cards, booze and women. After getting arrested and thrown into a concentration camp, Salomon leverages his skills for a better position, helping to produce fake foreign currency for the Nazi's Operation Bernhard, an effort to destabilize the UK's economy while simultaneously funding the Nazi war machine.

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What are critics saying?

70

Village Voice by

At its best--and queasiest--The Counterfeiters asks disturbing questions more commonly found in the survivor literature of Primo Levi or Bruno Bettelheim than at the movies.

80

The New Yorker by David Denby

The Counterfeiters is a testament to guile. Ruzowitzky scored the picture with tangos, and the tangos are meant to be Sally’s music--seductive, insolent, triumphant.

70

Variety by Eddie Cockrell

The moral quandary of Nazi complicity is revisited in taut drama The Counterfeiters, which tells the true story of a disparate group of imprisoned artists, financiers and swindlers secretly assembled in a concentration camp to forge millions of pound and dollar notes to support the German war effort.

75

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

From an historical perspective, the story is interesting because it shows a different side of the war than what we're used to observing in motion pictures.

75

TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox

Though extensively fictionalized -- Sorowitch is loosely based on the notorious, larger-than-life forger Salomon Smolianoff; Herzog on SS officer Bernhard Krueger, after whom the operation was named.

70

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

The Counterfeiters demonstrates that no matter how many Holocaust stories the movies tell, there are always new and unexpected ones waiting to be revealed.

75

New York Post by Kyle Smith

Based on the true story of the world's largest counterfeiting operation, The Counterfeiters is full of the weird details that, though unsurprising on one level, are so jarringly wrong that they seem fresh: As a reward for producing 134 million pounds sterling, the prisoners get a pingpong table.

67

The A.V. Club by Tasha Robinson

Markovics largely rescues the film with his mesmerizingly layered, steady performance as a man who solves the problem of compromise by refusing to admit that he's compromising.

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