“I Will Be Your Preacher Teacher”: Babygirl Peter Verstraten July 2025 Feature Articles Halina Reijn is the first Dutch filmmaker to have a breakthrough in Hollywood since Paul Verhoeven, who made six feature films in America between 1987 (RoboCop) and 2000 (Hollow Man). Instinct (2019), a Dutch-l...
The Hidden Force: Dutch Films about the Colonial Past in the East Indies Peter Verstraten May 2024 Feature Articles When, some thirty years ago, I attended a preview of the Dutch documentary Tabee Toean (Thom Verheul, 1995) at a conference held in Amsterdam, the non-Dutch viewers were surprised that the documentary had been ...
The Exorcism of Sinister Ghosts: Saralisa Volm’s The Silent Forest Peter Verstraten May 2023 Feature Articles Papas Kino (Daddy’s Cinema) was the derogatory term applied to the post-war West German films that reproduced the conventions of movies made in the fascist era. The so-called Heimatfilm (“homeland movie”) in pa...
Acts of Faith: On Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021) Peter Verstraten May 2022 Feature Articles Several reviewers have described Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021) as a lesbian nunsploitation drama. Reports about the film, which had its world premiere at the Cannes film festival, invariably mention its prov...
A Cocktail of Lunacy and Love: Poetic Dimensions in Fabrice Du Welz’s “Ardennes” Trilogy Peter Verstraten July 2021 Feature Articles After a modest attempt to create a national film industry in bilingual Belgium had run aground in the 1950s, Belgian cinema was split into two separate small cinemas – a Flemish and a Walloon (French-speaking) ...
Moonlight as a ‘Mass Art’ Film Peter Verstraten October 2019 This is what defined cinema in the 2010s Given his interest in paradoxes, the French philosopher Alain Badiou dubbed cinema a ‘mass art’, although not every film can be categorised in this way. On the one hand, many movies are above all commercial far...
Valeska Grisebach’s Western: an unacknowledged remake of Samuel Fuller’s Run of the Arrow Peter Verstraten June 2018 Feature Articles The oddest thing about Western (2017), the third feature film by the German director Valeska Grisebach after Mein Stern (Be My Star, 2001) and Sehnsucht (Longing, 2006), is its title. Borrowing neither an origi...
Le Fidèle as a Postmodern Love Romance: The Flemish Crime Dramas of Michaël R. Roskam Peter Verstraten March 2018 Feature Articles Because of the almost insurmountable linguistic barrier between Flemish in Flanders and French in Wallonia, the history of twentieth-century Belgian cinema is best seen as a ‘split screen’ between two language ...
Fortunate Sinners: Martin Koolhoven’s Brimstone as an ‘Edam’ Western Peter Verstraten June 2017 Feature Articles Between 1999 and 2008, the Dutch director Martin Koolhoven made eight feature films, none like any of the others. In 2005 he shot the multicultural rom-com Het schnitzelparadijs (Kitchen Paradise), about a Moro...
A French Connection: Paul Verhoeven’s Elle in Tandem with Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game Peter Verstraten December 2016 Feature Articles Over the course of his long career, the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven has been at the centre of many a success and many a controversy. His second feature film, Turks fruit (Turkish Delight, 1973), is still the ...
Middle-of-the-Road Absurdism: The Cinema of Dutch Director Alex van Warmerdam Peter Verstraten March 2014 Feature Articles Practically all published items on Borgman (2013), no matter how tiny, mentioned the fact that this was the first Dutch film to enter the Cannes main competition since 1975, the year Jos Stelling’s debut featur...
