Movies
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
Best / Worst of the Decade
Wide Releases
Now In Theaters
49
2012
53
Alice in Wonderland
41
Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
84
Avatar![]()
69
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
53
Blind Side
53
Book of Eli, The
25
Bounty Hunter, The
43
Brooklyn's Finest
55
Christmas Carol, A
31
Cop Out
55
Crazies, The
57
Daybreakers
43
Dear John
56
Diary of a Wimpy Kid
27
Did You Hear About the Morgans?
55
Edge of Darkness
45
Extraordinary Measures
83
Fantastic Mr. Fox![]()
42
From Paris with Love
61
Green Zone
xx
Hot Tub Time Machine
65
Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The
74
Invictus
57
It's Complicated
34
Law Abiding Citizen
33
Leap Year
32
Legion
42
Lovely Bones, The
54
Men Who Stare At Goats, The
34
Ninja Assassin
19
Old Dogs
39
Our Family Wedding
47
Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief
39
Planet 51
79
Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
73
Princess & the Frog, The
69
Redbelt
40
Remember Me
31
Repo Men
64
Road, The
57
Sherlock Holmes
47
She's Out of My League
63
Shutter Island
27
Spy Next Door, The
36
Tooth Fairy
44
Twilight Saga: New Moon, The
83
Up in the Air![]()
34
Valentine's Day
25
When in Rome
71
Where the Wild Things Are
43
Wolfman, The
63
Youth in Revolt
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Limited Releases
Now In Theaters
67
3 Idiots
47
44 Inch Chest
82
Ajami![]()
71
American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein
73
Amreeka
75
Art of the Steal, The
43
Barefoot to Timbuktu
19
Bitch Slap
49
Blood Done Sign My Name
xx
Bluebeard
24
Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, The
76
Broken Embraces
52
Celine: Through the Eyes of the World
67
Children of Invention
53
Chloe
68
City Island
64
Cloud 9
65
Coco Before Chanel
84
Cove, The![]()
83
Crazy Heart![]()
21
Crazy on the Outside
51
Creation
xx
Daddy Long Legs
81
Damned United, The![]()
57
Defendor
61
Delta
68
Departures
64
District 13: Ultimatum
72
Easier with Practice
xx
Eclipse, The
85
Education, An![]()
61
Exploding Girl, The
70
Eyes Wide Open
24
Falling Awake
81
Fish Tank![]()
56
For My Father
52
Formosa Betrayed
xx
From Mexico with Love
43
Frozen
xx
Ghost Town
77
Ghost Writer, The
69
Girl on the Train, The
75
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The
47
Good Guy, The
76
Greenberg
35
Happy Tears
68
Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suess
20
Harlem Aria
76
IMAX: Hubble 3D
11
Killing Jar, The
52
Killing Kasztner
xx
Kimjongilia
41
Last New Yorker, The
76
Last Station, The
47
Little Traitor, The
51
Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, The
71
Lourdes
73
Me and Orson Welles
77
Messenger, The
79
Mid-August Lunch
57
Missing Person, The
76
Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, The
80
Mother
50
My Name is Khan
85
Neil Young Trunk Show![]()
49
Nine
67
North Face
64
October Country
67
Off and Running
52
Paranoids, The
40
Phyllis and Harold
49
Pop Star on Ice
49
Private Lives of Pippa Lee, The
74
Prodigal Sons
xx
Promised Lands (Re-release)
90
Prophet, A![]()
76
Red Riding Trilogy, The
65
Runaways, The
32
Saint John of Las Vegas
83
Secret of Kells, The![]()
69
September Issue, The
36
Serious Moonlight
57
Severe Clear
63
Shinjuku Incident, The
35
Shutterbug
77
Single Man, A
76
Still Bill
34
Stolen
xx
Suicide Girls Must Die!
52
Tales from the Script
74
Terribly Happy
74
That Evening Sun
47
To Die for Tano
19
To Save a Life
63
Toe to Toe
69
Town Called Panic, A
54
Until the Light Takes Us
60
Videocracy
84
Vincere![]()
66
Waiting for Armageddon
45
White on Rice
82
White Ribbon![]()
xx
White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights, The
43
Women in Trouble
xx
Word is Out
64
Yellow Handkerchief, The
64
Young Victoria, The
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Black Book
EMAILPRINTSony Pictures Classics

Generally favorable reviews
Based on 34 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 39 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Foreign | Suspense/Thriller | War
Written by:
Gerard Soeteman
Paul Verhoeven
Directed by: Paul Verhoeven
Release Date:
Theatrical: April 4, 2007
DVD: September 25, 2007
Running Time: 145 minutes, Color
Origin: Netherlands / Belgium / UK / Germany
Language(s): Dutch / English / German / Hebrew (with English subtitles)
Summary
RATING: R for some strong violence, graphic nudity, sexuality and language
Starring Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman, Halina Reijn, Waldemar Kobus, Derek de Lint, Christian Berkel, and Dolf de Vries
Set in Holland during World War II, this is the story of a Jewish singer who joins the resistance against the Nazis.
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Basic Instinct Hollow Man Robocop Showgirls Starship Troopers Total Recall
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Premiere Glenn Kenny
Black Book is Verhoeven's best film since "RoboCop": audacious, smart, shamelessly entertaining.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Like much of Verhoeven's best work, it's shamelessly melodramatic, but in its dark moral complexities it puts "Schindler's List" to shame. Van Houten and Sebastian Koch (The Lives of Others) are only two of the standouts in an exceptional cast.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach
In less accomplished hands, Black Book could have been a hopeless mishmash. But Verhoeven proves a sure-handed storyteller, which might come as a surprise, as well as a terrific visual stylist, which shouldn't.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
A highly original and progressively riveting personal adventure.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray
In the end, Black Book may be one of the most fun movies ever made about how people basically suck.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett
It succeeds on almost all fronts. The epic film is a high-octane adventure rooted in fact with a raft of arresting characters, big action sequences and twists and turns galore.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Black Book possesses a taut, exciting script that throws surprises at the viewer on a regular basis.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
While Rachel's story is fiction, many of its incidents are rooted in historical events carefully researched by Soeteman and the film's briskly staged action and stunning reversals of fortune ensure that its two and a half hours fly by.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
A hard-core war film with raw violence, intense action, graphic sexuality and a twisting plot that offers a series of surprises.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Just for starters, no movie about the Dutch Resistance during World War II has any right to be this wildly entertaining, not to mention this provocative and potently erotic.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
The movie scrambles our responses and covers so much ground, with such zest, that its two and a half hours race past like a firestorm.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Black Book takes the conventions of the WWII epic -- the prison breaks, the interrogation scenes -- and undermines them with craft and muscle and the ripe lack of restraint we've come to expect from this director.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Don R. Lewis
Carice van Houten as Rachel/Ellis is as captivating as any screen siren working today.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Black Book is its own kind of thriller. The film is filled with the genre's conventions -- suspense, betrayal, melodrama, violence, music -- and it's hugely enjoyable from start to finish.
New York Magazine David Edelstein
I urge you not to pass up Black Book, especially on a wide screen. It's a marvelous movie-movie, with a new screen goddess. Van Houten has a soft, heart-shaped face on top of a body so naturally, ripely beautiful it has its own kind of truth.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
Black Book, which takes its title from a secret list of Dutch collaborators, is an impressively old-fashioned yet fashionably embittered movie.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
As epic as its two-hours-and-25-minute running time indicates, Black Book is as subversive as it is traditional, both enamored of conventional notions of heroism and frankly contemptuous of them.
Read Full Review >Variety Derek Elley
Moves like an express train across almost 2½ hours without any sense of rush and with strong, empathetic characters etched en route.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marrit Ingman
The action set-pieces, double crosses, and narrow escapes are handsomely mounted and suspenseful as a Saturday matinee.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
The action is nonstop and often harrowing and well staged. But van Houten, while a charmer, doesn't adequately convey the disgust (and connivance) that her character would inevitably feel in such a situation.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein
Van Houten, a veteran of European TV, is in almost every scene, and her energetic performance keeps Black Book percolating despite an overstuffed plot that strains credibility and often tips over into melodrama.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Black Book takes a brave, if odd, approach to a WWII historical drama, but one thing is certain: No one in the theater will be bored.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Black Book doesn't let the grim facts of the Holocaust get in the way of some ripping pulp.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
It's a messy, colorful big-screen entertainment that veers from sober period piece to outrageous melodrama, which is to say it's a Verhoeven movie.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Black Book may be the looniest use of the Holocaust as a playground since Roberto Benigni served up his infernal clown act in "Life Is Beautiful."
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
Like Stone in "Basic Instinct," van Houten has an audacity to match Verhoeven's. Hers is a role that Bette Davis would have killed Ingrid Bergman for, and she is so good in it that it seems only a matter of time before she'll star in a real Hollywood movie - as opposed to this pretender.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
On the one hand, Black Book has the artiness of subtitles, the dramatic weight of history, and the desperate heroics of Jews hiding from Nazis. On the other hand, it has Paul Verhoeven.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
The storytelling -- the script is co-written by Verhoeven's old collaborator Gerard Soeteman -- is messy, and the result never feels real or human or vital.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
This is a film that dearly wants to be important, that wants to do for Holland what Irene Nemirovsky's "Suite Française" does for France - examine the German occupation through a prism of painful honesty. Yet the lofty ambition comes dressed in cheap attire; Verhoeven can't seem to stop himself from shopping downmarket.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
Black Book works only if you take it for the pulpiest of fiction, not a historical gloss, its stated claims to "true events" notwithstanding.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
The new Dutch film Black Book manages to turn World War II into a large piece of cheese. A lurid, pulpy, slightly perverse potboiler, the movie suffers mainly from its utter lack of seriousness.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
This is trash pretending to serve the cause of history: a "Dirty Dozen" knockoff with one eye on "Schindler’s List."
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Ella Taylor
A viscerally effective thriller ends up a repugnant exercise in moral relativism, delivered with the grandstanding swagger of the self-styled provocateur.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.9 (out of 10) based on 39 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
france l gave it a2:
This is 'Indiana Jones meets the Dutch Resistance'. I haven't seen this many fanciful, absurdly unrealistic escape scenes since, well, Indiana Jones. The difference is that this movie, peopled with stock characters and flimsy action sequences, wants to be taken seriously as a commentary on WWII Nazi atrocities. Puhleeze.
Cuculiza O. gave it an8:
Verhoeven doesn't want to teach you a lesson. He just wants to entertains you telling this story through a riveting thriller with Van Houten gracing the screen just as well as any other movie siren these days.
Christopher gave it a10:
This was one of the best films one can see. It was well done; great plot, great acting and excellent photography. I watched it 2 times - it was that good.
Rob T gave it a9:
This is not only a return to form for Verhoven, but by far the best movie he has ever made. It's effectiveness comes from the fact that it doesn't try to be too preachy or delve too deep into the history of the German occupation of Holland. It is, at its core, a taut thriller that doesn't let up for a moment during its two and a half hours. The fact that it takes place during WW2 is almost irrelevant.
[Anonymous] gave it a9:
Strong, exciting, visually superb, but sort of James Bondish. Outstanding entertainment with significant sadness.
Jack S. gave it an8:
A very silly melodrama. Lots of gunfights in which dozens of heroes and German soldiers get killed, lots of bare breast and a story line like naked snake wrestling. Therefore, a very watch-worthy flick. Heh.
Mark W gave it a3:
Black Book may be the most overrated film of 2007. While getting past stereotypical cartoon Nazis and saintly resistance fighters is a worthy goal, this melodrama is little more than a well acted soap opera. Carice van Houten's performance makes this film mildly entertaining, and may account for so many reviews seeing more in this mess than is actually delivered.
