Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

dir. Bharat Nalluri

On your desk, is there a Cathy coffee mug filled with peanut M&M's? If so, you will love, love, love Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, a double-whammy period-costume comedy/chick flick so earnest its very title seems like a Simpsons joke. (Didn't Marge and Lisa sneak off to see this one rainy afternoon?)

For what it's worth, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is better than its title, thanks to its star leads and unblinking devotion to its hoary old heart-warmer of a plot, which tracks the down-on-her-luck nanny Miss Pettigrew (Oscar® winner Frances McDormand) as she stumbles into a job as social secretary for the frazzled starlet Delysia Lafosse (Oscar® nominee Amy Adams). What follows is essentially a female spin on Jeeves and Wooster, with the boozy Wooster replaced by the slutty Delysia, and the ingenious butler replaced by the bossy secretary—although I don't imagine fussy Jeeves was ever subjected to such a glorious makeover as Miss Pettigrew, who journeys from soup-kitchen hobo to (spoiler alert!) rich man's fiancée in the course of a single day.

If you like movies where people journey from soup-kitchen hobos to rich men's fiancées in the course of a single day, Miss Pettigrew will not disappoint. Anyone looking for anything special—wit, humor, better-than-okay performances—will leave empty-handed. Both McDormand and Adams bring what they can to the proceedings, but given the flimsiness of the material, neither can achieve much beyond a good, sturdy stock character. (Adams in particular comes off like a cartoon in search of a cause.) Still, the whole thing flounces by inoffensively enough, and the set design (by Oscar® nominees Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer) is incongruously accomplished. As my companion noted, "I know it sucked, but every single lampshade in that movie was fucking gorgeous." DAVID SCHMADER

The Counterfeiters

dir. Stefan Ruzowitzky

As a Holocaust story, the Oscar-winning Austrian film The Counterfeiters is a little too entertaining. It even has, unlike most movies of its kind, a happy ending. But it is based on a true story: how the Nazis ran the largest counterfeiting operation in history from inside a concentration camp. The master counterfeiters were imprisoned Jews, and if they were successful, the money would be used by the Nazis to flood the economies of England and America and win the war. It's a fascinating and little-known episode.

Into this scenario, director and writer Stefan Ruzowitzky (adapting the book The Devil's Workshop by Adolf Burger) inserts certain fancies, including a prior relationship between the Nazi officer and the master counterfeiter, Salomon Sorowitsch (played perfectly by Karl Markovics).

But the greater tension is between inmates, who disagree about what they're willing to do, even though death is the punishment for defying orders. One, the eventual author of the real-life book, Burger (played by August Diehl), is a principled fighter—and a potential martyr. He has the skill that will complete the last piece of the puzzle of counterfeiting the English pound, but he refuses to deploy it in an attempt to sabotage the Nazis. Sorowitsch is furious, both as a pragmatic survivor and as a storied counterfeiter.

Just as there are characters of varying virtue on the Jewish side of the camp, so there are Nazis of varying monstrosity. The real subject of this film is extremism: When is it not only justified but also productive? The delay caused by Burger did keep the Nazis from flooding the economies of England and America long enough for the Allies to win the war, but Burger's own survival had to do less with his politics than with the protection of Sorowitsch, who in some ways cozied up to the Nazi project. Without both men—which is to say, without the relative moderation produced by the interaction of both tendencies—history might be different. The expediency of political moderation is a strange virtue to emerge from a Holocaust film, but here it is, a moral uncomfortable enough to distract from the entertainment. JEN GRAVES

The Bank Job

dir. Roger Donaldson

It's hard not to lower your expectations for a film about a bank job called The Bank Job. Like David Mamet's heist film Heist before it, Job tries to lull viewers into a state of B-movie complacency. The first thing onscreen is a pair of naked breasts, followed immediately by an orgy featuring even more breasts. The whole, breastful tableau is scored with T.Rex's "Get It On." The biggest B-movie sop, though, is the star: Jason Statham plays Terry, a sketchy car dealer and struggling family man. The camera loves Statham's rugged charm, but his ability to play a real character, one with motivations beyond "kick-ass tough guy in a tight spot," is negligible.

The Bank Job is based on a true story, and it's a compelling one: In 1971, a team of part-time thieves made off with the contents of a roomful of safe-deposit boxes. London was obsessed with the crime for a few days, until the media stopped covering it, allegedly under pressure from the government. Unfortunately, the movie suffers from a crippling lack of attention to detail—only a few characters' hairstyles, dialogue, and outfits are in period, as though half the production crew forgot they were working on a film set in the '70s—and the actors are given nothing to do but dutifully represent their respective clichés.

All the heist-movie tropes are here. There's the gathering of the thieving team, including the baby-faced innocent on lookout and a conman named The Major; the handoff at a crowded train station; the torture scene; and the inevitable double-cross. With more lifelike direction and a script that reveled in the lunacy of this real-life heist actually working, this could have been an engagingly cheap and dirty film. As it is, it's just another movie called The Bank Job. PAUL CONSTANT