Dolf de Vries Movies

Filmmaker Paul Verhoeven returned to the Netherlands after more than twenty years of success in Hollywood to direct this epic-scale war drama based on a true story. Rachel Steinn (Carice van Houten) is a beautiful Jewish woman living in German-occupied Holland during late 1944. Her family members - who have been falsely promised safe passage to Belgium (their names recorded in the 'black book' of the title) are instead robbed and slaughtered by the Germans on a premeditated basis; Rachel herself manages to escape by diving into the water and swimming away. She narrowly avoids capture, then joins the local resistance movement. With her hair dyed blonde, Rachel can easily pass for Aryan, and when the leader of the Dutch resistance movement learns his son has been captured by Axis forces, Rachel is asked to use her feminine charms to persuade a German commander to arrange for the boy's release. Rachel soon finds herself caught up in a dangerous double life as she becomes a sexual plaything for the Nazis while attempting to bring down their evil empire as a spy. Zwartboek was written by Verhoeven and Gerard Soeteman, who collaborated on the 1977 international success Soldier of Orange. Zwartboek received its world premier at the 2006 Venice Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Gabriel is a mural painter from Dutch Surinam who has been hired to paint a mural of the Virgin Mary in a church in Curaçao. Curaçao is a self-governing island in the Netherlands Antillees off the coast of South America. In the story, he has taken a mixed-race woman as his model, and the emerging picture, with its negroid features, is creating quite a stir. Meanwhile, he has fallen in love with his model, who is engaged to a white police officer, and the wife of the island's governor has fallen in love with him. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Housewife Edda Barends, waitress Nelly Frijda and secretary Henriette Tol have but one thing in common: murder. Acting virtually on impulse, the three women kill a male store owner who has caught Barends shoplifting. Psychiatrist Cox Habbema is engaged to prove that the women are insane so that they can avoid being sent to prison. A few sessions later, however, Habbema has cast her lot with the killers! The moral seems to be that murder is justified so long as it stems from dissatisfaction with the entire Male population. One would think that Question of Silence (originally released in the Netherlands as De Stilte Rond Christine M...) would be rejected out of hand by the largely male Dutch Film Finance Corporation. Instead, the Corporation was so enthusiastic over writer/director Marleen Gorris' project proposal that it put up all the production money. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

With this fact-based World War II drama and the equally memorable The Fourth Man (1983), Dutch director Paul Verhoeven gained an international following, eventually translating his reputation into Hollywood fame as the director of bloody science fiction spectacles and prurient sex thrillers. Rutger Hauer stars as Erik Lanshof, an aristocratic Dutch student, one of six carefree friends who don't care much for politics. When the Nazis invade Holland, however, the group is drawn inevitably into the conflict. While Alex (Derek de Lint) joins the German army, the suave Gus (Jeroen Krabbe) becomes a resistance leader, eventually escaping with Erik to England, where they become pawns in a much larger underground movement to restore their country's Queen Wilhelmina (Andrea Domburg) to her rightful throne. Based on an autobiographical novel by Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, Soldaat van Oranje (1978) also features early work by another Dutch master who went on to success as a director of big budget Hollywood films, cinematographer Jan De Bont. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

In Paul Verhoeven's sexual psychodrama Turkish Delight -- an adaptation of Jan Wolkers' best-selling erotic novel -- Rutger Hauer (Soldier of Orange) is Eric, an Amsterdam artist whose paintings and sculptures are all perverse. He spends his days wandering around the city and picking up young female lovers -- whom he beds and then tosses aside mercilessly -- and keeps an extensive scrapbook of mementos from his bedmates. Eric is deeply haunted, however, by a dysfunctional past relationship. He only fell in love on one occasion: with Olga (Verhoeven regular Monique Van de Ven), a mentally unstable woman dying of a brain tumor. The film received a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination in 1973 and became one of the most lucrative motion pictures ever generated by the Dutch film industry. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide