The Counterfeiters

Writer/director Stefan Ruzowitzky explores the moral corrosion of Nazi complicity with this tightly wound adaptation of Adolf Burger's fact-based book -The Devil's Workshop. Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) may be a talented artist at heart, but his desire for wealth has driven him to use his ...more

Any film that explores the Holocaust has to tread lightly on what is sensitive ground for an entire sect of people, not to mention a point in history that can never be erased, explained, or understood to its fullest potential. The Counterfeiters has its work cut out for it, as it fictionalizes the story of a Jewish artist, passport forger, and counterfeiter who is hauled to a concentration camp and subsequently recruited by the Nazis to help them cripple Europe's economy by flooding England's ...more

"Average" Holocaust films -- if it's not insensitive to refer to them as such -- capture the stark, ever-present misery of life in the camps. But the superior ones plunge deeper into the camps' bitter ironies, into the false comforts that may have actually weakened the inhabitants' resolve toward defiance. And what gets more bitterly ironic than Jewish prisoners who unwittingly fund the Nazi war effort by counterfeiting international currency? The Counterfeiters, which won the 2007 Oscar for ...more