Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: Video On Demand
Release Date: October 14, 2008
Running Time: 100 minutes
Sales Rank: 17350
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Theatrical Release Date: January 01, 2007
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Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Better than expected
Found this movie for $5 at the video store--a 'gem' at that price. The story of the Nazis forcing concentration camp inmates to forge foreign currency to bankrupt England was compelling. The 'dilemma' the characters face of doing good work and enjoying more comfortable survival, or sabbotaging their captors efforts, drives the film. The special features include a Q&A with the Director where a lot of great information is told about what happened to the characters after the War.
Rating:  - Too grainy & shaking
The story is interesting and the presentation is fine, but for two things that it is worth only 3 stars to me:
1. too much grainy effect on the video quality that it seems only marginal improvement over DVD ver, which I happened to have bought earlier, and the comparison of two tells no big difference. It is said to be the director's intent to make it look like old style movie, but too much would ruin what made us buy the BR version instead of the DVD. The DVD version in 480p is truely what the director desired for heavy grainy look!
2. too much hand shaking effect to the camera in many occasions. The director seems to produce the effect that there was a camerman running with the actors and shotting at the spot. But again, too much of anything would kill the good intent. It just gets me headache to watch.
Anyway, still a good film produced by foreign producer other than Hollywood esp based on WWII true stories.
Rating: - Excellent movie about an interesting true story.
This is a pretty interesting movie. It is based on a true story. At times, especially at the beginning, it seems to jump quickly over events. It takes a little to get into the flow of the movie and feel comfortable with who the characters are. The end of the movie is a bit abrupt also. You aren't quite sure what happened to some of the main characters between the last days of the war and the ending where the main character is in a Casino in Monaco. In spite of these drawbacks, this is an interesting movie that makes you want to go out and learn more about the events it was based on.
Rating: - A Compelling Story, Strangely Told
The German-Austrian film The Counterfeiters is based on a remarkable true story. Late in World War Two the Nazis rounded up Jews who had been confined in various concentration camps and set up a large counterfeiting operation designed to undermine the British and U.S. economies. The Nazis found some 150 Jews with the necessary skills and put them together in a special section within the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, providing the latest money-making equipment, giving them plenty of food and comfortable accommodations. But the counterfeiters were constantly pressured to produce (at pain of death) and there were sadistic S.S. guards who cruelly reminded the counterfeiters that they were still in Hell.
Just outside the counterfeiters' quarters other prisoners were brutalized by the Nazis. In one incident, a group of the counterfeiters can hear a guard insulting a man as he executes him. The bullets fly through the very wooden wall next to which they are standing.
It's an important and compelling story. But much of the film was shot with a hand-held that often awkwardly jumps from actor to actor in prolonged scenes. In one of the DVD special features writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky asserted that he was trying to create a documentary effect. I think he failed at this. It all comes off as too contrived.
The main character is Saloman "Sally" Sorowitsch, portrayed very energetically by Karl Markovics. Sally is a very clever, tough, wily man who jerkily moves ... Read More
Rating:  - an amazing more or less true story
Until watching this movie, I had no idea that the largest counterfeiting operation of all time was carried out by prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp. They were assigned to forge pounds and dollars, in order to undermine the Allied economy and finance the Nazi war effort. They ended up printing over 100 million pounds sterling, which even the Bank of England could not distinguish from the genuine article. On the other hand, as a result of stalling tactics, they didn't crack the dollar until the war was almost over and it no longer made any difference.
This movie is a fictionalized version of this story. Prisoners with relevant skills are brought in to a special, top-secret area in a concentration camp, where in contrast to the appalling conditions elsewhere, they are provided with sufficient food, decent beds, time for breaks, etc. But if they don't produce results, they will be shot. Sorowich, a master counterfeiter, is brought in to take charge of the counterfeiting operation. Burger, one of the other workers on the operation, wants to sabotage the operation, so as to hamper the Nazi war effort. This view is not popular among the other workers, who do not feel like dying for this cause, just so that other workers can be brought in to do the job for them. Much of the movie is a dramatization of this moral argument. The end result is to delay the production of the dollar just enough. The protagonist is Sorowich, who initially just wants to save his skin, and also has a ... Read More
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