70
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.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
70
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
The Counterfeiters is a swift and suspenseful thriller, and perhaps a little too entertaining for its own good.
80
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
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.
70
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
The Counterfeiters is inevitably serious, even austere, and full of chilling, ironic details.
75
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
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.