[1] After receiving attention for the TV series Floris in his native Netherlands, Verhoeven's breakthrough film was the romantic drama Turkish Delight (1973), starring frequent collaborator Rutger Hauer.

Verhoeven later returned to Europe, making the Dutch war film Black Book (2006), French psychological thriller Elle (2016) and the religious drama Benedetta (2021), all receiving positive reviews.

Showgirls was a notorious box office flop at its initial theatrical release, but later enjoyed huge success in the home video market and became a cult classic.

From this period, Verhoeven mentioned in interviews, he remembers images of violence, burning houses, dead bodies on the street, and continuous danger.

As a small child, he experienced the war as an exciting adventure, and has compared himself with the character Bill Rowan in Hope and Glory (1987).

He made the documentary Het Korps Mariniers ("The Marine Corps", 1965), which won the French 'Golden Sun' award for military films.

Based on a novel by bestselling Dutch author Jan Wolkers, Turkish Delight tells the passionate love story of an artist and a young liberal girl from a conservative background.

Verhoeven built on his reputation and achieved international success with the Golden Globe-nominated Soldier of Orange (1977),[14] starring Rutger Hauer and Jeroen Krabbé.

Based on a true story about the Dutch resistance in World War II, it was written by Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema.

The story is sometimes compared to Saturday Night Fever, but it has more explicit violence and sexuality (in this case also homosexuality), which are sometimes seen as the director's trademarks.

[15] The San Diego Union-Tribune called Verhoeven "a busy bee whose movies pollinate the festival circuit".

[16] Gerard Soeteman also wrote the script for Verhoeven's first English-language film, Flesh and Blood (1985), which starred Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

The film's most notorious scene shows Sharon Stone's character in a police interrogation, where she uncrosses her legs, briefly revealing her vulva (she does not wear underwear underneath her skirt).

[17] During this time, Verhoeven also worked on creating an historical epic based around the Crusades that would have starred Arnold Schwarzenegger.

[22] After Basic Instinct and Showgirls, Verhoeven returned to the science fiction genre, utilizing the graphic violence and special-effects tropes that had marked his earlier films, making Starship Troopers (1997), loosely based on the novel of the same name by Robert A. Heinlein,[23] as well as Hollow Man (2000).

After about twenty years of working and living in the United States, Verhoeven returned to the Netherlands for the shooting of a new film.

A psychological thriller in which Isabelle Huppert plays a rape victim, Elle was selected for the Official Competition at the Cannes International Film Festival, where it obtained very favourable reviews.

In December 2016, it was announced that Verhoeven would be the president of the jury for the 67th Berlin International Film Festival, scheduled to take place in February 2017.

An erotic political thriller, it is set in Washington DC and is about a "young staffer who works for a powerful Senator [and] is drawn into a web of international intrigue and danger.

Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait was released in September 2008 in Dutch, and was published in English in May 2010 by Seven Stories Press.