Black Book
Sony Pictures Classics | Release Date: April 4, 2007 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
71
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 34 Critic Reviews
Positive:
27
Mixed:
3
Negative:
4
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
PremiereGlenn Kenny
Black Book is Verhoeven's best film since "RoboCop": audacious, smart, shamelessly entertaining. Read full review
100
Chicago ReaderJonathan 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
100
Baltimore SunChris 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
91
The A.V. ClubNoel Murray
In the end, Black Book may be one of the most fun movies ever made about how people basically suck. Read full review
91
Seattle Post-IntelligencerWilliam Arnold
A highly original and progressively riveting personal adventure. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterRay 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
88
Rolling StonePeter 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
88
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
Black Book possesses a taut, exciting script that throws surprises at the viewer on a regular basis. Read full review
88
TV Guide MagazineMaitland 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
88
USA TodayClaudia 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
88
Chicago TribuneMichael 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
88
Boston GlobeTy 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
80
VarietyDerek 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
80
Village VoiceJ. 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
80
Los Angeles TimesKenneth 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
80
Wall Street JournalJoe 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.
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)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
80
Film ThreatDon R. Lewis
Carice van Houten as Rachel/Ellis is as captivating as any screen siren working today. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleMarrit Ingman
The action set-pieces, double crosses, and narrow escapes are handsomely mounted and suspenseful as a Saturday matinee. Read full review
75
Christian Science MonitorPeter 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
75
San Francisco ChronicleRuthe 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
75
Miami HeraldRene 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
75
Philadelphia InquirerSteven Rea
Black Book doesn't let the grim facts of the Holocaust get in the way of some ripping pulp. Read full review
70
SalonAndrew 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
67
Entertainment WeeklyLisa 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
63
New York Daily NewsJack 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
63
New York PostKyle 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
58
Portland OregonianShawn 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
50
The New York TimesManohla 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
50
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
38
Charlotte ObserverLawrence Toppman
The storytelling is inept and illogical. Read full review
30
The New YorkerAnthony 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
30
L.A. WeeklyElla 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
30
Washington PostStephen 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
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