A two-hour Stella Artois commercial replete with weathered European men, amorous women, and frothy pints of beer, I Served the King of England also happens to satirise the absurdity of war, offend the Jewish, and lionise small people the world over. Yet it’s a much less outlandish retrospective of Nazism than Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book: a bold, brawny feminist war epic starring the drop-dead gorgeous Carice van Houten in an unapologetic performance of sexual gambit and brute emotional force. Nobody objectifies the female form quite like Verhoeven, and for a time, his heroine finds herself sucked into the vacuum left by Elizabeth Berkley and Sharon Stone. Ogle her private parts we might, but it’s those eyes that hit all the right spots, and van Houten transcends any lurid necessity with chutzpah and a degree of self-ownership; indeed, hers is the rarest of roles, a constructive, non-submissive Jew who isn’t going to take this shit lying down (except when seducing the Gestapo’s top brass).

Basically Army of Shadows with tits and ass, Verhoeven’s film trades regularly in nudity and sex. For the Dutchman, neither is complete without the titillation of violence, and there’s something reckless, if not dangerously arousing about his penchant for flesh and blood while dealing in the historical gravity of WWII. But it’s through such a treacherous minefield of moral ambiguities and the blurring of friend and foe – where fiction and reality are smudged in lieu of Werner Herzog’s no-show in the straight-faced Rescue Dawn – that Verhoeven manages to deliver more truths about the war than the self-righteousness of Schindler’s List, or the numbing combat realism of Saving Private Ryan. More than a Darryl F. Zanuck throwback, Black Book is in fact the kind of movie Steven Spielberg used to make: loud, pulpy, wildly inflated, and utterly gripping. It also understands the decadence of war by simply allowing itself to entertain. Guilt is part of its pleasure, and Verhoeven wrote the book on spectacular bad movies. I wouldn’t write off Black Book though; so ballsy and unadulterated in execution, you’ll struggle to put it down.—Tim Wong