Chris Kaltenbach

A movie of unforced nobility and quiet pleasures, Butterfly works on all sorts of levels.

The film has a lot of right in it, including an ending that's suitably uncertain, but fraught with possibilities.

Instead of a sweeping epic, this adaptation of a novel by Elizabeth Bowen is much quieter, a work perhaps too understated and stereotypical for its own good.

While it displays its share of quirky charm, off-kilter characters and outlandish situations, this is really the first film where you can feel the Coens straining to keep up with themselves.

Wedding Crashers is unashamedly profane and, for its first two acts, very funny, a classic guilty pleasure that revels in its basest elements.

"His eye is incredibly sharp and amazing, in regard to visceral cinema," says Uma Thurman, who has worked with Tarantino on both Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. "He's a great storyteller. He's very seductive as a filmmaker."

There's plenty to like about Adrenaline Drive, including the appealing, sympathetic performances of its two young stars and the tongue-in-cheek humor that pervades the film.

Monsieur Ibrahim is about people interacting as people, not symbols (one reason, Sharif has said, he took the role was to help his grandchildren's generation understand that idea).

An opportunity to enjoy the pure adrenaline rush that has always been the hallmark of martial-arts cinema.

Doesn't display a single deep thought, or even a middlingly profound one.

There's an awful lot of kinetic energy to Chopper, and the violence is portrayed as graphically as imaginable.

Surprisingly funny, a deep-down-good-hearted take on that oldest of comedy conventions, the ill-prepared rube caught up in a situation that somehow never gets the best of him.

Graeme Obree was a champion bicycler who, by all accounts, rarely took the easy way out. Too bad this movie version of his life doesn't follow suit.

Benefits from an amiable chemistry between Harrelson and Banderas, and Davidovich always makes a good tough-as-nails dame with more smarts than any man will give her credit for.

Characters are manipulated and lives made whole in ways both satisfying and unexpected.

Heaven is so determined to be poetic and beautiful, it comes across as forced and didactic, a lesson in relative morality whose storyline doesn't so much flow as lurch from one stretch to another.

The people are just a little too calculatedly quirky in Off the Map, an otherwise engaging comedy.

There's a self-loathing at the center of Friends with Money that makes it a tad unpalatable, as well as a sameness, a dependence on cliche, that makes it seem trite.

There's more than a trace of James Dean in Gosling, except that he's a rebel with a cause.

Fits squarely into the "exciting" category; it's a white-knuckler of the first order.

Come Undone would have benefited immensely from less constricted performances from Elkaim and Rideau, both of whom go through the film determined not to crack a smile.

The movie may be too precious for mass consumption, but its filmmakers' willingness to assume the best of their audience, combined with its Everyman origins, suggest a movie that deserves a chance.

A terrifically engrossing war film in which not a single shot is fired, a movie about shaping events rather than being shaped by them.

Tightly scripted and intricately plotted, the buddy film manages the neat two-step of being simultaneously profane and engaging.

Russian Dolls never resorts to sitcom moments as it explores the transformation of friendship into love. All the characters here are believably appealing and refreshingly three-dimensional, and the situations they find themselves in have the ring of truth. You leave this film wanting to know these people, wanting the best for them.

Bolt proves a refreshing throwback to the animated classics of yore.

When it sticks to the subject, the movie is sad and affecting.

If nothing else, it may make one appreciate the cartoon even more.