Most critics take Black Book as a lively return to form for Paul Verhoeven: a brisk, twisting resistance thriller that is more entertaining than respectable. The praise clusters around Carice van Houten, whose performance is singled out in nearly every review as the thing holding the film together, with Sebastian Koch’s work opposite her noted more than once. The reviews also tend to credit the film’s refusal of moral clarity, its view of collaborators and resisters as equally compromised, and Verhoeven’s taste for the outrageous.
The reservations are about plot and plausibility. Several critics find the twists pile up past the point of credibility, and Slant Magazine argues the plotting is mechanical and the characters thin. The spread is fairly wide, from near-raves to one sharp dissent: The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane dismisses it as shallow soap opera with a sanitised view of wartime suffering, though even he admires van Houten.