Critic Reviews
71
Metascore
Generally Favorable
positive
27(79%)
mixed
3(9%)
negative
4(12%)
Showing 34 Critic Reviews
All Reviews
All Reviews
Metascore
Metascore
100
Black Book is Verhoeven's best film since "RoboCop": audacious, smart, shamelessly entertaining.
100
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.
100
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.
91
In the end, Black Book may be one of the most fun movies ever made about how people basically suck.
91
A highly original and progressively riveting personal adventure.
90
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.
88
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.
88
Black Book possesses a taut, exciting script that throws surprises at the viewer on a regular basis.
88
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.
88
A hard-core war film with raw violence, intense action, graphic sexuality and a twisting plot that offers a series of surprises.
