Paul Verhoeven’s first film in French ranks among his most incendiary, improbable concoctions: a wry, almost-screwball comedy of manners about a woman (a brilliant Isabelle Huppert) who responds to rape by refusing the mantle of victimhood.

Paul Verhoeven demonstrated his ability to deliver both genre thrills and serious social commentary in this prescient and disturbing look at the rise of the corporate police state, set in a dystopian, futuristic Detroit.

Nomi, a tough-as-nails drifter with a go-it-alone attitude and a murky past, arrives in Las Vegas and fights her way up from stripper in a sleazy club to star showgirl. Unbound by musty notions of “good taste,” Showgirls goes further than any other film of the 1990s in its orgiastic depiction of consumerism, crass spectacle, and the dark side of the American dream.

Part comic book-style action adventure, part scathing satire of the military-industrial complex, Starship Troopers is one of the most subversive artistic acts ever perpetrated with a $100 million budget.

Named the Best Dutch Film of the Century by the Netherlands Film Festival, Verhoeven’s hugely successful sophomore film is an alternately sweet and steamy romance filled with his typically perverse touches.

The last film Verhoeven directed in Holland before decamping for Hollywood is one of his most outlandish and inspired: an alternately funny and freaky hothouse blend of oneiric symbolism, homoeroticism, religious iconography, and witchcraft.

Verhoeven’s sleek, sexually daring thriller is Vertigo for the 1990s, with Michael Douglas as the troubled police detective seduced into a series of cat-and-mouse mind games by Sharon Stone’s Hitchcock-blonde crime novelist.

Shifting loyalties, double crosses, and Mata Hari-esque sexual intrigue abound in Verhoeven’s morally complex World War II thriller.

Verhoeven’s first feature—about two enterprising prostitutes looking for love in swinging ‘70s Amsterdam—is unmistakably his: outrageous, satiric, erotic, and gleefully unrespectable.

Verhoeven’s first English-language film is a muddy, bloody, brutal vision of the Middle Ages.

Verhoeven’s last Hollywood film to date is this underrated, twisted take on The Invisible Man, with Kevin Bacon as an egomaniac scientist whose experiments with invisibility unleash his inner homicidal maniac.

One of Verhoeven’s most visually beautiful films depicts both the squalor and opulence of 19th-century Europe, as the eponymous heroine goes from prostitute to artist’s model to fine lady in turn-of-the-century Amsterdam.

Each made by Verhoeven before his first feature, these five short films center around youth and school life, and provide a glimpse into the director’s early fascinations with female dominance, technology, and war.

This bracing World War II epic—with Rutger Hauer as a resistance leader in Nazi-occupied Holland—was the film that brought Verhoeven to Hollywood’s attention.

This satiric, sexually frank psychodrama charts the coming-of-age of three motocross-obsessed young men and plays like a male-driven precursor to Showgirls.

Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Verhoeven’s head-tripping adaptation of Philip K. Dick is like RoboCop played at hyper-speed, with its themes of corporate control, memory, and identity delivered in an even faster, funnier, and gorier package.

In a daring online experiment, over 400 people contributed to the crowd-sourced script that resulted in this darkly comic family farce.