Listings for Friday, May 9, through Thursday, May 15, 2008

The Counterfeiters

Capsule by Jonathan Rosenbaum

From the Chicago Reader

Adapted from Adolf Burger's memoir The Devil's Workshop, this skillful, absorbing, Oscar-winning Austrian feature involves a Russian-Jewish counterfeiter (expertly played by Karl Markovics) who gets arrested in Berlin, winds up in a German concentration camp in 1944, and is put in charge of a secret forgery unit. Staffed by prisoners who've been granted special privileges, the unit counterfeits pounds and dollars in a plan to wreck the British and American economies, and one of the prisoners, a member of the communist resistance, attempts to sabotage the effort. Written and directed by the able Stefan Ruzowitzky (The Inheritors), this poses some tricky moral questions, and its troubling ambiguities rank a cut above the dubious uplift of Schindler's List. In German with subtitles. R, 98 min.

This movie is currently playing at: Renaissance Place

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