“The Counterfeiters”

Now that the academy has spoken and anointed this engrossing Austrian film as the best foreign language film of the year, it wouldn’t be fair to ignore it just because a certain Romanian film got left off the list. Based loosely on real events, “The Counterfeiters” deals, as its title hints, with a massive Nazi plot to counterfeit both British pounds and American dollars on such a massive scale that the economies of both countries would be destroyed. The film’s style is mainstream and straight-ahead, but because the counterfeiting was done largely by Jews in concentration camps, the film presents some provocative moral dilemmas.