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Just for starters, no movie about the Dutch Resistance during World War II has any right to be this wildly entertaining, not to mention this provocative and potently erotic. In part, it's a love story about a sympathetic Nazi and a Jewish girl who dyes her hair blond, pubes included, to seduce him. Only in a Paul Verhoeven movie, kids. The Amsterdam-born director made his name in Hollywood sending Ah-nuld to Mars in Total Recall, uncrossing Sharon Stone's legs in Basic Instinct, building a better police state in RoboCop and crafting the most watchable flop ever with the deliciously awful Showgirls.

For those with longer memories, Verhoeven first made his mark in the Netherlands with a series of feisty films (Spetters, Turkish Delight, The Fourth Man). The best was 1979's Soldier of Orange, a tale of the heroic Dutch Resistance, a theme that Verhoeven and screenwriter Gerard Soeteman seek to re-examine and even repudiate with Black Book. The title refers to the book containing the names of Jewish families who spend their savings for boat passage out of German-occupied Holland in 1944, only to be betrayed to the Nazis, who rob and murder them.