The Counterfeiters

I really liked this film, in spite of the fact that it is the 14,000th film about the Holocaust to come out in the last 50 years. The reason Counterfeiters works is that it’s not just a Holocaust movie; it’s also sort of a caper film. The Nazis have arrested Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), the greatest counterfeiter of the Weimar era. With World War II (The big one! Very important war! Someone should make a movie about it!) in full swing, the Nazis decide to use Sorowitsch’s skills to make fake money to finance their war effort. Sorowitsch and a group of concentration-camp prisoners are put to work with a twin imperative: If they don’t make the funny money, they’ll be killed. But if they do make it, the Nazis could win the war. Counterfeiters manages to be tense and gripping with only a modicum of cheap emotional manipulation. Also, it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, so that means that the people who run Hollywood said it was good. And they said that homosexual marriage, the fight against global warming and R-rated teen films were good, so they know what they’re talking about.