The Counterfeiters

In Nazi Germany, Jewish forger Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) winds up in the death-camp system, where he joins the German war effort, helping to counterfeit British and American currency to undermine the Allied economies. In last year’s Oscar-winning foreign film, Austrian writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky fictionalizes “Operation Bernhard” (a real Nazi operation during World War II) as a means of putting a human face on the Holocaust—not only the wretched, dehumanized victims, but the monstrous, inhuman perpetrators, the squalid bureaucracy as well as the offhand, unquestioning Jew-hatred. Ruzowitzky’s cleverest touch is to juxtapose the haunting, haunted Sorowitsch with his jailer (Devid Striesow)—both going along to get along, the latter deluding himself that they’re on the same side.