Meanwhile, in Charlotte Gray, we are presented with a far more familiar movie landscape--WWII-era Europe--and a slightly more conventional movie heroine: Cate Blanchett as a female spy for the good guys. Blanchett plays Charlotte as a willing naif, whose participation in the war effort arises out of her simple desire to do good, and the less noble desire to be reunited with her soldier lover lost behind enemy lines. Because she speaks fluent French, she's recruited (by some guy she happens to sit next to on a train) into the British SOE spy ring, which takes her from the three-gals-in-a-flat squalor of wartime Scotland, via a brief training course, to the French idyll of Lezignac, all cobblestones, incredible chateaux, and sexy French Resistance soldiers (like Billy Crudup).

Of course, Charlotte soon becomes the traditional ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances--and frankly, a bit of a saint--but director Gillian Armstrong (Last Days of Chez Nous) is too much of a sensualist to let the proceedings become conventional. Neither does she skimp on the historical details: The Resistance is wrestling with its own Communism, as well as with its country's Nazi collaboration. The combination allows Armstrong to imperil her beautiful actors, indulge the gorgeous scenery (those purple flowers!), and tell a gripping little war story all at once. Nice one.