Loved this film had me gripped from the start , so many twist & turns , the heroine was one tough lady to do what she did to survive , whilst utimately still doing the right thing. Up there with Schindler's List for me , highly recommended and at the price a bargain .

Great movie and well worth watching. Unnecessary nudity(but much appreciated) and great acting.

So what if a few little details were unplausible....(ie. previous reviewer and the choc/insulin scene...it is a film after all), this is a fantastic film!!!
So exciting!.....and intense!....and reallly reveals how the WW2 did devastate people's lives....and both the good and evil we as humans are capable of....something we should never forget...
This film was fabulous on every level!.....watch it!!

A film worth watching, with some good performances, particularly van Houten. Everything should have been in place to produce a truly memorable story. However like Verhoven's Soldier of Orange this film failed to impress me, or indeed affect me. None of the characters, of which there were too many was really explored in any detail and whilst many scenes were well staged the whole failed to gel. There were too many plot strands, for a while the film moved in a Night Porter direction, which dissapointingly was never realised.
Worst of all amongst the sloppy direction are the vast numbers of implausible details, for example the chocolate/insulin scene...a remarkable recovery! The firing squad- none of the ranks would have obeyed. The head shaving happened in France- not so sure about Holland. What did happen in Holland was mass starvation and this hardly gets a mention. Most bizzare is Ellis' incredible ability to recover from the murder of her entire family and lover. Both this film and Soldier of Orange suffer from the same problems , self indulgent, unfocussed direction, which leads to two rather shallow films, which don't do justice to the subject.

the whole film is so well acted and scripted,possiby
among the best films you'll see this year
working with the dutch resistance,a jewish girl does
what she has to do to survive,she works under-cover at
a german controlled compound.
her relashionship with a german officer coupled with a failed mission by the resistance brings her loyalty into question.
this is a hard hitting film,really good.
this film is sub-titled in the main,don't let that put you off.
i can only reccomend that you watch the film.
once you do it will become a must for your dvd collection.

A very well put together film. The acting was good and the beautiful Carice Van Houten played her part exceptionally well. You may notice that the SS runes on uniforms were blacked-out in this film ; something to do with today's Political Correctness maybe? Anyway, worth adding to one's collection.

what a great film. Will have to watch the film again (which will be a pleasure ) just to make sure I didn't miss anything while reading the sub-titles. Ellis must have 9 lives though. Buy it !!!!

After years of high-concept Hollywood schlockbusters, the somewhat disappointing Kevin Bacon vehicle Hollow Man sought Paul Verhoeven to slide into the background of moviemaking for six years. With a fresh desire to return to one of his great interests, the Nazi occupation of his native Holland and the resistance forces that tried to bring the German forces to its knees from the inside, Verhoeven slipped into a period of research and source-gathering in order to achieve the same sort of realism and authenticity which he had achieved to stunning effect with his career-defining Soldier of Orange almost thirty years before.

The resulting film can only be described as perhaps the triumph of Verhoeven's career, a sweeping, brutal, prophetic and emotional war epic, with one of the single greatest performances by a female actress in European cinema history. The beautiful, down-to-earth Carice Van Houten, combining the sort of nostalgic romanticism of early Garbo, Bacall or Hayworth and the emotional breadth of Deneuve or Binoche, embarks on a journey first of escape, then of retribution across the backdrop of the Second World War. Like Rutger Hauer in Verhoeven's other war movie, Rachel Stein is a heroine desperate for freedom, desperate to bring the Nazis toppling down. But while Soldier of Orange charts the tale of a man engaging in outsider-espionage, Black Book's narrative sees a more dangerous tale of internal resistance fighting; it is a story of audio-trackers, hitmen, midnight ammo-drops and mass killings, and while it would have been all too easy for Verhoeven to resort to cliche-driven Nazi-stereotyping, the villains here are more odious or sympathetic because of their humanity (see for example Sebastien Koch in typically-brilliant form), with shades of Hirschbeigel's revisionist bunker-thriller Downfall taking historical character-representation to a new level.

The classical narrative sweeps along at a pace combining the best of Hollywood's story-driven cinema with flourishes of arthouse realism. And whilst many critics will see it as a typical Boy's Own adventure story (but with a very nice-looking woman instead of a tobacco-chewing Tommy), the pace is shot through with all those stylistic nuances that we have come to expect from a director that has never shyed away from the darkest of human desires and the will to entertain his pop-cultural audience: nudity and sex, blood-letting and shoot-outs abound, and Verhoeven greets us with a maturity beyond anything Hollywood's historical genre has offered in a long time.

The Dutch director and his star have produced an incendiary piece of cinema, and while it may border at times on the melodramatic, Verhoeven and Van Houten never drift away from the real thematic force of the story. For ultimately, as we approach the end of Black Book, the message lingers long after the credits roll. Easily one of the greatest war movies of all time, it marks a decisive career best for its director, and a testament to the power of European cinema.

This is a great film if you like your war film thrillers, this is a must..Its subtitled because the director was passionate about this film and went for realism, knowing if it was in complete English it would have made a lot more money, there is no point in telling the synopsis because you can read that elsewhere, as for erotic scenes taking in context with the film and even though the leading lady is beautiful you will probably not find them erotic at all (you will be so engrossed in the film your brain wont have time for that believe me, very weird for me but that just goes to show how good this film is) Give this film a chance its good its about passion...the people that made it were passionate..they could have copped out and filmed all in english and made a fortune but didn't..I want more film like this...this film will have you on the edge of your seat...(my girlfriend will not watch subtitled films..she has never ever watched one...I stuck it on anyway..well she was on edge of her seat the whole movie...nuff said..

An amazing film with edge of your seat twisty turny stuff.