Black Book

Date: November 13
Location: Clifton Living Room

Master of excess Paul Verhooven brings his signature pulpy style to a most somber topic — World War Two — and delivers a rousing old-school Hollywood movie-movie. Carice van Houten does Oscar-worthy work as the main character, a Jewish songstress who joins the Dutch resistance and goes undercover as the girlfriend of an SS officer. Filled with double-crosses, shootouts and steamy sex scenes, Black Book is the most fun you can have watching Nazis. It also has a moral complexity and a somber pessimism about human nature and the ubiquity of war. Certainly the best thing Veerhoven has done since Robocop, and one of the nicest surprises of the year.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s