Fantastic!

Absolutely the worst movie.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Wow. This film is thrilling, informative, and realistic. The cinematography is brilliant, and the movie effortlessly takes you straight to the '30s.There is so much to say, I'd say it in my blog:legendsonsilver.blogspot.com Overall, there are fantastic performances. The lead actors do justice to their roles. As for the direction, you instantly feel a classic brilliance emanating from the screen. The sets, the performances- everything breathes out of the screen. In this regard, the director does a better job than even Tom Cruise's "Valkyrie" did.

No wonder this won the Oscar for best foreign film of 2007.Amazing that a Jew was operating in Berlin counterfeiting money as late as 1936. It was also amazing that he didn't suffer the same fate of the rest of his people.Sure he did not. The Germans used him and others to make phony pounds. This was done to flood the British country with the money so as to create an extreme inflation. Once they succeeded in this, the Nazis turned their attention to the good old American dollar.These counterfeiters were given the "best" of conditions in concentration camps including soft beds.The film shows the cohesiveness of these men who worked, while outside death ran supreme.Naturally, there is a vicious guard whose cruelty goes unmatched.The film shows how the men deceived the Nazis by stalling with the phony dollars.

I perfectly know that a Foreign Academy Award is indication a movie has great production values, but maybe nothing more. The people entitled to vote for this award make the winner a reflection of themselves: somewhat pedantic with a slight touch of low-key stock sentimentalism. Ah, and based-on-a-true-storism is great for both pedantic and sentimentalist easy-flowing images.I should have know better. Yet another movie about concentration camps, and a Hollywood-sunshine approved one! Well, I had been learning some fascinating facts about Operation Bernhard in recent years and I thought this movie would offer a tremendous depiction of it. I haven't read the book - which is not widely available in English - and it seems it wasn't the most interesting way to make an exciting movie about Operation Bernhard.Wonder why the movie barely fills a 90-minute spot? Because it has very little stuff to tell. It pales in comparison with the most emotionally powerful PoW/concentration camps movies, and it pales in comparison with the breathtaking suspense of the best documentaries describing Operation Bernhard.IMO the "rest of the world Oscar" and the Operation Bernhard premise don't count among the good reasons to watch Die Fälscher.

The Holocaust has been revisited in film so many times that I imagine the first thing German-born film actors ask themselves upon meeting is "which film(s) were you a Nazi in?" The crimes of the Nazi Party and the German soldiers carrying out its mission to revive Germany through the mass killing of Jews and other "invalids" are so unfathomable and powerful that filmmakers and storytellers can't help but find so many ways to tell complex stories of morality and human survival."The Counterfeiters" is another one of these films, but lack of originality is absolutely the only knock against it."Counterfeiters" focuses on a group of Jews assembled by the Nazis to create mass quantities of Ally currency to be used to decimate Ally economies. It's the same type of lens on the Holocaust, but a different "edition" so to speak. Yet the script is immaculate, the drama understated and effective, the plot completely engaging, and best of all: it's a Holocaust film under two hours -- and a great one at that. It begins with a morally complex main character, the crooked-faced Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), who before the war was a professional counterfeiter, one with considerable artistic talent who chose the more "financially sound" career. Simply put, he's a criminal and the crimes of the Holocaust manage to make us sympathetic to him. He's an honest criminal, but a criminal no less. As the leader of his counterfeiting team in a way, following his point of view is extremely interesting. There is his survival instinct, his pride over the work even though it's helping the Nazis and characters such as his friend Burger the printer (Adolf Burger, who wrote the book the film is based on), who pressures him not to do the work and risk death on principle.These are all familiar Holocaust film themes. There are the Jews who will do anything to stay alive, helping the Nazis or doing whatever they bid for an extra scrap of food and soft beds and those who would be willing martyrs, dying before they stoop to a certain level or help a Nazi.The difference is in the execution. Stefan Ruzowitzky has done an incredible job adapting Burger's incredible true account. He's identified the key moments and turning points and crafted ideal scenes to help build the plot up. He wastes no time getting to the point. The scenes are short and sweet, giving us bursts of information, emotion and symbolism, sometimes in just a minute. Directing off his own script, he directs us to key visuals that convey all that information like a leftover piece of food that conveys the hunger not always at the forefront of a scene. The pacing is exceptional, especially for a Holocaust film, and though some of the scenes are brutal it doesn't hit the audience over the head with scenes of terror and emotion that go straight for the heartstrings. It's much more subtle and effectively so.It's hard to visit yet another Holocaust film, but "The Counterfeiters" is worth it because of Ruzowitzky's fine craftsmanship and its overall subtly. It's the impact of a Holocaust film without all the emotionally distressful scenes and the screaming and the heartfelt violin music. The unique story of Sorowtisch and these group of Jews who are given a bit more privilege yet in turn forced to wrestle with a bit of moral guilt makes it a warranted trip into a oft-visited historical genre.~Steven CVisit my site http://moviemusereviews.com