For Fans of Paul Verhoeven

When Starship Troopers opened in 1997, critics largely missed it. Audiences thought they were watching a dumb bug shoot-em-up. Verhoeven, a Dutch director who lived through Nazi occupation as a child, knew exactly what he was making: a point-by-point recreation of Leni Riefenstahl aesthetics wrapped in a summer action movie, daring viewers to enjoy it. The film's 'Would you like to know more?' recruitment ads are so well-crafted as propaganda that they actually persuade. That's the trap. Buenos Aires gets destroyed to justify a war, citizens earn rights through military service, and the heroes never question any of it. The film is most disturbing when it's most fun.

The ED-209 boardroom scene tells you everything about how Verhoeven sees corporate America. A prototype law-enforcement robot malfunctions and kills an OCP executive, and management's first response is to discuss liability. RoboCop came out in 1987 and imagined a city so bankrupt it outsourced its police force to a weapons company. It imagined media so degraded it reduces murders to comedy. The hero is a man whose humanity has to be reclaimed against the corporation that owns him. Thirty-five years later none of this requires explanation.

For decades Verhoeven was accused of exploiting women on screen rather than serving them. Elle, released in 2016 with Isabelle Huppert in the lead, answered that charge with the most controlled and complex performance in any of his films. The character is a rape survivor who refuses to behave the way narrative convention demands: no helplessness, no obvious trauma arc, no outsourcing of agency. The film is uncomfortable precisely because it will not simplify her response. It is arguably the most mature work Verhoeven has made, and it arrived forty years into his career.

After the commercial failure of Hollow Man, Verhoeven returned to the Netherlands and made Black Book, a Dutch-language World War II thriller released in 2006. It is a corrective to the kind of WWII film that divides the world cleanly into heroes and monsters. His protagonist works as a spy inside Nazi headquarters, and the film is interested in moral compromise on every side: Dutch collaborators, self-interested resistance fighters, corrupt liberators. It moves with the momentum of a thriller and the weight of a reckoning. It is the film that should be on the syllabus alongside his American work.