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 Gera number of'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".

Posted by: dwhudson    Source

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