Black Book (15) <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

Director and Hollywood provocateur Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, RoboCop) returns to the Nazi-occupied Netherlands of his boyhood and to the genre in which he first won acclaim with Soldier of Orange, back in 1977.

Black Book, scripted in Dutch and German, is on one level an old-fashioned war movie about courage and survival; on another, it subverts assumptions about the nobility of Resistance fighters, some of whom are seen to be as brutal as the Nazis. Carice van Houten stars as a Jewish chanteuse who, having witnessed the slaughter of her family, goes undercover to insinuate herself into the affections of an SS bigwig.