Metacritic reviews

Some delicately interwoven and unresolved subplots help make the young character's rite of passage wholly, disturbingly compelling.

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

A beautiful, harrowing film of understated power and perception that affords Fernando Fernán Gómez, the Spanish cinema's great, weathered veteran, yet another of his unforgettable performances.

The movies' time-honored old-man-and-boy theme has rarely been used to such great advantage.

A savory cocktail with a bitter twist.

Diverges to become something quite powerfully unnerving and guilt-ridden.

Delicate, quietly devastating.

It's a rare film that can make us look so deeply into the dark soul of the seemingly benign.

Though beautifully photographed, acted and written (the three source stories are skillfully blended into a single narrative), this leisurely, bittersweet look at a child's loss of innocence ends rather abruptly and inconclusively.

In the end, Butterfly is an infuriating film because it's so very contrived, so annoyingly phony.