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100The Counterfeiters is in its own smart, trim fashion "The Bridge on the River Kwai" of concentration-camp sagas. Also based (like Kwai) on a real-life story, this movie starts small but becomes a miniature epic of overreach and moral drift.
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91Without doing anything so divisive as taking sides, The Counterfeiters pays sympathetic attention to those who play their cards to win even when the rules are terrible, not least because the remarkable Markovics, an Austrian TV actor with a pugnacious anvil of a head, is so riveting as an unsaintly survivor.
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90This poses some tricky moral questions, and its troubling ambiguities rank a cut above the dubious uplift of "Schindler's List."
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89The Counterfeiters differs from most Holocaust movies in that the emphasis is on the personal moral choices that are made rather than the overall horror and despair.
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88Swift and compelling, winner of this year's Oscar for best foreign-language picture, The Counterfeiters may not be destined for the large international audience that embraced last year's winner, "The Lives of Others." But it's the better, tougher film, with a more provocative moral dilemma at its center.
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88Quiet, watchful, out for himself, Sorowitsch is a complicated figure - neither hero nor villain, and certainly no fool. The Austrian actor Markovics is riveting in the role; he is wiry, anticipatory, his eyes darting with intelligence and worry.
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88Some movies rest on an actor's face, and The Counterfeiters has a great one.
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80The 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.
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75It is always intriguing as it follows the arrest and captivity of Salomon Sorowitsch (the terrific Karl Markovics), one of Germany's leading counterfeiters.
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75Based 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.
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Well made, provocative and compelling.
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75Though 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.
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75From 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.
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75A conventional mixture of thriller and moral drama, the film is unsettling in both intentional and unintentional ways.
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While terrific entertainment, The Counterfeiters fails to stir the soul.
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75A gripping, unusual and suitably harrowing -- if, in the final analysis, not particularly satisfying -- concentration camp drama.
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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.
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70The Counterfeiters demonstrates that no matter how many Holocaust stories the movies tell, there are always new and unexpected ones waiting to be revealed.
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70The Counterfeiters is a swift and suspenseful thriller, and perhaps a little too entertaining for its own good.
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70The 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.
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70The Counterfeiters is inevitably serious, even austere, and full of chilling, ironic details.
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Though swiftly paced, The Counterfeiters convincingly examines the complex nature of humanity under inhuman conditions
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67Markovics 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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