Pop Smart - Film Review: The Counterfeiters

SHOW ME THE MONEY: Karl Marcovics (left) and Devid Striesow

(Photo © 2007 Sony Pictures Classics)

The Counterfeiters is that rare movie about the Holocaust where the line between good and evil is never fully drawn, and the shades of morality get grayer as the story unfolds.

Schindler’s List might well be the genre’s definitive masterpiece, and while The Counterfeiters is almost everything Spielberg’s epic is not, in some ways it’s more effective in calculating the compromising effects of the Holocaust.

Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky adapted the story from a book by a survivor of Operation Bernhard, the Nazi effort to flood the British and American markets with counterfeit currency to destroy their economies. The Counterfeiters recently won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and is the only of the nominees scheduled (so far) to come through Atlanta.