|
|
|
| BLACK BOOK (ZWARTBOEK) (2006) - R
|
|  |
|
SBD Star Rating:
by Lew Irwin
View Credits | See Other Reviews
|
 Some critics, it seems, don't know what to make of Basic Instinct director Paul Verhoeven's latest film, the World War II drama Black Book. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times describes it as "supremely vulgar" and notes that it "works only if you take it for the pulpiest of fiction." That's precisely the way Glenn Whipp perceives it, as he writes in the Los Angeles Daily News that it's an "exhilarating potboiler that is thrilling, erotic and constant in its desire to upend viewers' expectations." Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times remarks that the film is full of "dizzying contradictions." It is, he says, "as subversive as it is traditional, both enamored of conventional notions of heroism and frankly contemptuous of them." And while John Anderson of Newsday describes it as "a strange movie," he comments that its release "marks a red-letter day ... for fans of sophisticated, high-tension melodramas, war movies and sexy adult thrillers." |
|
|
|
