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100Black Book is Verhoeven's best film since "RoboCop": audacious, smart, shamelessly entertaining.
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100In 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.
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100Like 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.
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91A highly original and progressively riveting personal adventure.
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91In the end, Black Book may be one of the most fun movies ever made about how people basically suck.
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90It 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.
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88Just 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.
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88The movie scrambles our responses and covers so much ground, with such zest, that its two and a half hours race past like a firestorm.
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88While 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.
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88A hard-core war film with raw violence, intense action, graphic sexuality and a twisting plot that offers a series of surprises.
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88Black 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.
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88Black Book possesses a taut, exciting script that throws surprises at the viewer on a regular basis.
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80Carice van Houten as Rachel/Ellis is as captivating as any screen siren working today.
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80I 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.
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80Black Book, which takes its title from a secret list of Dutch collaborators, is an impressively old-fashioned yet fashionably embittered movie.
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80As 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.
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80Moves like an express train across almost 2½ hours without any sense of rush and with strong, empathetic characters etched en route.
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80Black 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.
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78The action set-pieces, double crosses, and narrow escapes are handsomely mounted and suspenseful as a Saturday matinee.
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75Black 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.
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75Black Book doesn't let the grim facts of the Holocaust get in the way of some ripping pulp.
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75Van 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.
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75The 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.
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70It'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.
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67Black 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."
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63Like 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.
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63On 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.
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58The 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.
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50This 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.
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50Black Book works only if you take it for the pulpiest of fiction, not a historical gloss, its stated claims to "true events" notwithstanding.
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38The storytelling is inept and illogical.
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30A viscerally effective thriller ends up a repugnant exercise in moral relativism, delivered with the grandstanding swagger of the self-styled provocateur.
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30The 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.
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30This is trash pretending to serve the cause of history: a "Dirty Dozen" knockoff with one eye on "Schindler's List."
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 20 out of 26
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Mixed: 2 out of 26
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Negative: 4 out of 26
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