Black Book

"Jet-black swastikas on blood-red banners; graphic violence and frontal nudity; characters as serious as a sermon. It must be a Paul Verhoeven film."

"Black Book works only if you take it for the pulpiest of fiction, not a historical gloss, its stated claims to "true events" notwithstanding..."

"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..."

"Audacious, smart, shamelessly entertaining..."

"Expecting subtlety from Paul Verhoeven, the enfant terrible Dutch export behind Basic Instinct, would really be the triumph of hope over experience. But this World War II drama, Verhoeven's first film at home since 1983, beguiles by seeming at first to be the story of a Jewish woman getting one over on the Nazis. Faint hope. This is the Holocaust as soft-porn soap opera in which the heroine's major task is to be at least topless and, when possible, completely naked..."

"A bold, brawny feminist war epic..."

"Verhoeven pauses occasionally to make some timely points about the interchangeability of the words 'terrorist' and 'freedom-fighter', but is mostly concerned with filling his lengthy movie with as much punctured or penetrated flesh as possible. I never expected to laugh so hard at what was possibly supposed to be a serious film..."

"It's a twisty tale robustly told with lashings of sex and violence. Yes, despite the prestige-pic trappings, Verhoeven hasn't lost touch with his basic instincts; who else could bring us a scene of a woman dyeing her nether regions?.."