Premiere by Glenn Kenny

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

Chicago Reader by Jonathan 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.

Baltimore Sun by Chris 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.

The A.V. Club by Noel Murray

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

Seattle Post-Intelligencer by William Arnold

A highly original and progressively riveting personal adventure.

The Hollywood Reporter by Ray 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.

USA Today by Claudia Puig

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

TV Guide Magazine by Maitland 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.

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

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

Rolling Stone by Peter 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.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth 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.

Village Voice by J. Hoberman

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

Variety by Derek Elley

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

The New Yorker by Anthony Lane

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