Black Book (Zwartboek) Critic Reviews

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

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

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

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.Read the full review

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 the full review

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 the full review

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 the full review

In the end, Black Book may be one of the most fun movies ever made about how people basically suck.Read the full review

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 the full review