The Counterfeiters in the UK.

To hear Jonathan Freedland tell it, you'd think German cinema has only just now begun to deal with Nazism, WWII and the Holocaust. If "Downfall and The Counterfeiters suggest a watershed has been reached," we'll have to write a few names out of history, including, just for starters, Fassbinder and Syberberg, Wolfgang Staudte and Frank Beyer.

Besides, The Counterfeiters is Austria's entry in the Oscar race, not Germany's. Meantime, the Guardian's review: "Stefan Ruzowitzky's tale is fascinating because the material is so rich in dramatic potential, lifting the lid on a clandestine scheme in which a disparate group of concentration-camp inmates were corralled into propping up the German war effort," writes Xan Brooks. "And it is flawed because the moral implications of this scheme are so charged and turbulent that they defy neat resolution. If the film's inhabitants are walking a tightrope, it occasionally seems that that its writer-director is too."

In the Independent, Anthony Quinn gives it four out of five stars and writes, "This parable of fakery and compromise asks the most difficult question: how much would you be willing to sacrifice in the interest of your own survival? And how grateful do you feel that you will probably never have to answer it?"

It "plays like the first ever Holocaust heist movie," writes the Telegraph's Tim Robey. "It would be a stronger film still if survivor guilt took hold as its subject: a touch more of the chilling Faustian bargain from István Szabó's Mephisto (1981) might have helped. But it is a very thoughtful and imaginative effort all the same."

"When we meet the central character, Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), it doesn't seem that he's the kind of man who might be plagued by a bad conscience," writes Wendy Ide in the London Times. "Salomon's character arc is the spine of the film; it's a testament to Markovics's impressive performance that this very flawed man is so fascinating."

"It's another example of the new German cinema reaching the world outside with honor," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "Not perhaps as good as The Lives of Others but as horrifyingly watchable."

Posted by dwhudson at October 12, 2007 12:20 PM