Metacritic reviews

Black Book is Verhoeven's best film since "RoboCop": audacious, smart, shamelessly entertaining.

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.

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.

Black Book possesses a taut, exciting script that throws surprises at the viewer on a regular basis.

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.

A hard-core war film with raw violence, intense action, graphic sexuality and a twisting plot that offers a series of surprises.

Moves like an express train across almost 2½ hours without any sense of rush and with strong, empathetic characters etched en route.

Black Book, which takes its title from a secret list of Dutch collaborators, is an impressively old-fashioned yet fashionably embittered movie.

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.

This is trash pretending to serve the cause of history: a "Dirty Dozen" knockoff with one eye on "Schindler’s List."