at some point after i started really paying attention to who directed a movie, i realized that paul verhoeven had made 3 of my favorite films in a row.... followed by 3 films in a row that were... less good. (take a wild guess just from looking at his filmography.) verhoeven dropped off my radar after that, but recently it seems there's a verhoeventuality... his return to greatness. he abandoned the hollywood market where he was getting one sh**ty script after another and went back to making, by all accounts, some really good dutch movies. the first in the verhoeventuality (i'm just going to repeat this until it catches on or my tongue dies trying) is black book, a wonderful throwback to '40s and '50s spy thrillers. it's a film with real tragedy throughout that nevertheless makes time for moments of joy and relief. this is not going to be a schindler's list that just crushes you, and so you'll be able to watch it a second and third time, which you'll want to. every time i think there can't possibly be anything new to see in a wwii movie, somebody finds an angle that changes my mind. i was pretty unfamiliar with the dutch resistance (except for verhoeven's own excellent soldier of orange), and it was fantastic to see this angle led by not only a heroine, but a jewish one. carice van houten gives a bold performance here that unfortunately earned her hollywood attention... where she's been making mostly b-rate films ever since. she's supported by a bevy of great dutch, german, and english actors, almost all of whom i was unfamiliar with. keep an eye out for a young michael huisman, later of game of thrones. the story is really what kept me interested throughout the lengthy runtime though, as it runs the gamut from a kind of anne frank story to one of smuggling and escape to a smoldering war film to a spy thriller and a bit of a romance. there are multiple turns that i didn't see coming, which i honestly should have because verhoeven always plays with audience expectations. sometimes he fully embraces cliches in order to satirize them, and sometimes he completely deflates an audience expectation, like a spy getting their identity discovered almost immediately. his best films have a number of surprises in terms of how they play with genres, and even in his worst films, you would never accuse verhoeven of being unaware of what he's doing. it's just a matter of if he pulls it off or not. black book is a definite success, a film that feels like a novel compressed into a surprisingly manageable runtime. it's filmed cold at times, but that makes the richness of certain scenes (like inside nazi offices) really pop. it's predictable at times, which makes the surprises hit that much harder. it's funny at times, which makes the tragedy that much worse. verhoeven is a filmmaker that never shies away from extremes, showing all the sex, violence, brutality and humanity that more academy-friendly dramas might only hint at. i love that. a special note: i watched this shortly after downfall and it makes an interesting double bill. whereas that film supposedly shows the humanity of the nazis, i found it simplistic and pandering. in this film however, you find yourself rooting at times for people who have done very bad things. and then there are "good" guys who've done very bad things. even our heroine is flawed. it's a great portrait of how some people just do what they feel they need to to get by, while others go far beyond, and rationalize their evil later. it's a much more honest portrait of "good" and "bad" than in a film like downfall, and is a hard look at how people in power treated those without power, both during nazi occupation and after. it's far superior to downfall both thematically and in filmmaking technique... though sadly, not nearly as meme-able.