Oscar voters love Holocaust movies, and when "The Counterfeiters" arrived in Albany I dismissed it as just another Oscar-winning Holocaust movie. I knew little about it, other than that it had gotten good reviews and won the Oscar for best foreign film, but for some reason it didn't interest me, and I decided I would catch "The Counterfeiters" on video, eventually.

It's not that I have a problem with Holocaust movies. Some of them — "Schindler's List," of course, being the definitive example — are quite good. But while "Schindler's List" was an Event Movie when it came out in 1993 — my entire high school class was taken to see it — none of the subsequent Holocaust movies, no matter how fine their pedigrees, carried the same Must See urgency. The mild controversy about "Life is Beautiful" — did Roberto Benigni make light of the Holocaust by making a comedy set in a concentration camp? — got people talking and drew audiences to the theater, as did Benigni's somewhat shocking win for Best Actor. (Personally, I think Benigni is way more endearing when he's appearing in a Jim Jarmusch shaggy dog comedy such as "Down by Law" or "Coffee and Cigarettes.") I also enjoyed watching one of my favorite actors, Adrien Brody, come out of nowhere to win Best Actor for "The Pianist." And "Sophie's Choice" remains as moving and heartbreaking as it was when it was released.

At this point I know what to expect from a Holocaust movie, and when I see that label, it's hard to get excited. Even so, I found myself at a matinee screening of "The Counterfeiters" on Sunday. I'd planned on hiking, but decided to wait until the temperature dipped below 90 degrees; as I sweated in my apartment, I decided that the movie theater would be a good place to spend a couple of hours. But when I scanned the listings, I realized I'd seen everything I wanted to see, except the "Sex and the City" movie, and I couldn't, in good conscience, drag my friend Jack to that. So "The Counterfeiters" it was.

From the opening credits, I was fully absorbed in "The Counterfeiters," mainly because the movie's main character, a cynical counterfeiter named Salomon Soroswitsch (played by the Austrian actor Karl Markovics), is fascinating. He's an habitual criminal, a guy known as "the king of counterfeiters," and his main interest in life seems to be dressing well, sleeping with beautiful women and keeping step ahead of the law. Then he's arrested and sent to a concentration camp. He's smart and crafty, and he's able to secure decent jobs and stay alive. Eventually, the Nazis tap him to run "Operation Bernhard," the largest counterfeiting scheme of all time. He's sent to a relatively plush barracks, where he and a small team of prisoners work to counterfeit foreign currency. The Nazis believe that if they can find a way to print millions of British pounds they can cripple the world economy and undermine the Allied war effort. This is a true story — the movie is based on the autobiography of one of the characters — and the movie explains why "Operation Bernhard" ultimately failed.

"The Counterfeiters" is interesting and suspenseful. It raises moral and ethical questions that are worth pondering, and at times has the feel of a taut film noir. The main flaw, I thought, was the denouement; the film seemed to build to a climax that never quite played out the way I wanted it to. That's probably due to the source material. "The Counterfeiters" appeared to stick to the facts, and so the dramatic escape or heist that a Hollywood film might have contained never occurs. "The Counterfeiters" reminded me of the little-seen 2002 film "The Grey Zone," which tells the story of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, the squads of Jewish prisoners who helped the Nazis exterminate fellow Jews in exchange for a few more months of life. Both films show the moral compromises people make to survive, and the consequences of doing so. "I won't give the Nazis the satisfaction of being ashamed that I'm alive," Salomon tells a fellow prisoner in "The Counterfeiters," but throughout the film you see how his core beliefs are shaken by life in the camp.

Over the weekend I also watched a little-seen comedy called "Live Free or Die." This wasn't supposed to be a very good movie; but for the fact that it was set in New Hampshire, where I'm from, I might have ignored it. (The film's title, of course, is drawn from the state's ubiquitous slogan.) Even more appealing was the fact that "Live Free or Die" was actually filmed in New Hampshire rather than Toronto or some other cheap stand-in for the United States. The film concerns a two-bit criminal — the narrator describes him as the "Billy the Kid of the Granite State," which I thought was hilarious — with delusions of grandeur. He runs into an old high school pal who may or may not be developmentally retarded, and the two begin planning a heist.

"Live Free or Die" is not a good movie, but I sort of liked it, anyway, and not just because the dopey main characters reminded me of some of the kids in my 10th grade study hall. Parts of the movie are very funny, and I think it's safe to say that any movie containing this line of dialogue — "We've got to get the mopeds and make for the border" — can't be all bad.