Venice. Zwartboek.

"Paul Verhoeven's World War II drama Black Book is an ambitious throwback to the days of rousing all-action wartime pictures in which an intrepid loner risks everything to fight a clearly defined enemy," writes Ray Bennett in the Hollywood Reporter. "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 as a group of Dutch resistance fighters combat the Nazis not knowing they have a traitor at their core."

"Anyone expecting a return to the rough, socially transgressive pics that Verhoeven first made a name with in the Netherlands will be disappointed by Black Book," notes Derek Elley in Variety. "Film plays like a Euro version of his Stateside movies - a technically slick, mainstream production that toys around in subtle ways with the genre in which it moves."

Updated through 9/4.

Boyd van Hoeij at Cineuropa: "In Venice, Verhoeven explained that while researching [Soldier of Orange (1977)] he came across a lot of material that showed a side of Dutch involvement in the war that was not exactly glorious, but which could not be made to fit with the film’s patriotic tone. Almost 30 years later, Verhoeven has finally been able to use that material, for what he calls a return to 'a moral story that does not focus on special effects.'"

Dirk Schümer, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has a cautiously positive take on the film but raves unreservedly about Carice van Houten, "not only more beautiful but also a better actress than Scarlett Johansson."

Updates, 9/4: It's "not a particularly original piece of cinema," writes Lee Marshall for Screen Daily, "but it is rollicking, big-budget historical entertainment of the sort that the old continent so rarely gets right these days (the liberatory applause that wrapped its press screening in Venice was mainly pride that Europe can still do this kind of thing).... It’s not going to be that straightforward, either, to market a feature that is not quite a committed Holocaust drama, not quite a gung-ho war film and not quite a action-adventure romp: rather this is almost a case of The Piano meets The Third Man meets Kill Bill."

"Spectacularly entertaining," announces Time Out's David Jenkins. "Black Book has the manic inertia and blistering tension of a highbrow Hollywood blockbuster. But, as always with Verhoeven's films, there's a nasty twist..." The film "is quite literally a guilty pleasure. Now give it some damn awards."

Posted by dwhudson at September 2, 2006 8:33 AM