Metacritic Film

Counterfeiters, The

Starring Karl Markovics, August Diehl, and Devid Striesow

MPAA RATING: R for some strong violence, brief sexuality/nudity and language

Sony Pictures Classics
Crime  |  Drama  |  War
98 minutes | Color
German
Released In Theaters February 22, 2008

The true story of Salomon Sorowitsch, counterfeiter extraordinaire and bohemian who was in captured by the Nazis in 1944. He agrees to help the Nazis in an organized counterfeiting operation set up to finance the war effort. It was the biggest counterfeit-money scam of all time. Over 130 million pounds sterling were printed under conditions that couldn't have been more tragic or spectacular. During the last years of the war, as the German Reich saw that the end was near, the authorities decided to produce their own banknotes in the currencies of their major war enemies. They hoped to use the duds to flood the enemy economy and fill the empty war coffers. At the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, two barracks were separated from the rest of the camp and the outside world, and transformed into a fully equipped counterfeiters workshop. "Operation Bernhard" was born. Prisoners were brought to Sachsenhausen from other camps to implement the plan, and professional printers, fastidious bank officials, and simple craftsmen all became members of the top-secret counterfeiter crew. They had a choice: If they cooperated with the enemy, they had a chance to survive as first-class prisoners in a "golden cage" with enough to eat and a bed to sleep in. If they sabotaged the operation, a sure death awaited them. For the counterfeiters, it was not only a question of saving their own lives, but also about saving their conscience as well... (Sony Classics)

WRITTEN BY
Stefan Ruzowitzky
Adolf Burger

DIRECTED BY
Stefan Ruzowitzky

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

78 / 100

Critic Reviews

100 Baltimore Sun
The 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.
91 Entertainment Weekly
Without 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.
90 Chicago Reader
This poses some tricky moral questions, and its troubling ambiguities rank a cut above the dubious uplift of "Schindler's List."
89 Austin Chronicle
The 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.
88 Chicago Tribune
Swift 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.
88 Boston Globe
Some movies rest on an actor's face, and The Counterfeiters has a great one.
88 Philadelphia Inquirer
Quiet, 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.
80 The New Yorker
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.
75 Portland Oregonian Stan Hall
While terrific entertainment, The Counterfeiters fails to stir the soul.
75 Miami Herald
It is always intriguing as it follows the arrest and captivity of Salomon Sorowitsch (the terrific Karl Markovics), one of Germany's leading counterfeiters.
75 The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
A conventional mixture of thriller and moral drama, the film is unsettling in both intentional and unintentional ways.
75 San Francisco Chronicle David Wiegand
Well made, provocative and compelling.
75 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
A gripping, unusual and suitably harrowing -- if, in the final analysis, not particularly satisfying -- concentration camp drama.
75 ReelViews
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 New York Post
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.
75 TV Guide
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 Variety
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.
70 Los Angeles Times
The Counterfeiters demonstrates that no matter how many Holocaust stories the movies tell, there are always new and unexpected ones waiting to be revealed.
70 Village Voice Ella Taylor
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.
70 Wall Street Journal
The Counterfeiters is inevitably serious, even austere, and full of chilling, ironic details.
70 The New York Times
The Counterfeiters is a swift and suspenseful thriller, and perhaps a little too entertaining for its own good.
70 Washington Post Adam Bernstein
Though swiftly paced, The Counterfeiters convincingly examines the complex nature of humanity under inhuman conditions
67 The Onion (A.V. Club)
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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