Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Info: Opens today in area theaters; rated PG-13 for some partial nudity and innuendo; 92 minutes.

A carefree farce, which this movie wants so desperately to be, should move a lot faster and be more fun than it is. Frances McDormand plays Miss Pettigrew, a plain-Jane governess just fired from her last job in pre-World War II London, who through luck and a few lies of omission becomes social secretary to a bubbly American starlet (Amy Adams) busy juggling three boyfriends - a shady club owner (Mark Strong), a callow young theater producer (Tom Payne) and her good-hearted piano player ("Pushing Daisies' " Lee Pace). There is plenty of joy in Adams' featherlight performance, but not much anywhere else in the dour pacing set by director Bharat Nalluri (whose previous feature was the little-seen "The Crow: Salvation," filmed in Salt Lake City).

2007 Academy Award Nominated Animated Shorts

Info: Opens today at the Tower Theatre; not rated, but probably PG-13 for cartoon violence and language; 85 minutes.

Long gone are the days when Walt Disney and Looney Tunes dominated the Oscars' animated-short category - and with no Pixar entry among the five nominees, the emphasis is more on artistic wonder than yukking it up. There are the surreal stream of images in "I Met the Walrus," set to a teen's tape-recorded 1969 interview with John Lennon; the stop-motion puppetry (with human eyes superimposed for a creepy effect) in the death allegory "Madame Tutli-Putli"; the puppetry in the comic con job "Even Pigeons Go to Heaven"; and the painterly touches of the Russian saga "My Love." But the program's highlight is also the Oscar winner: a richly rendered stop-motion version of "Peter and the Wolf," set beautifully to the famous Prokofiev score.

The Bank Job

Info: Opens today in theaters everywhere; rated R for sexual content, nudity, violence and language; 111 minutes.

Isn't the point of a heist picture that there's somebody, either a jauntily plucky bunch of robbers or one honest cop, worth rooting for? No such luck with this downbeat and sluggish thriller, based on a real-life case in London, 1971. The movie depicts a group of thieves, led by action toughie Jason Statham ("The Transporter") and Saffron Burrows, tunnelling into a vault for all the safe-deposit goodies - and what happens when one of the depositors, a porn merchant (David Suchet) with a stash of incriminating evidence against crooked cops and a few members of Parliament, wants his items back. And when MI-5, a dominatrix and a black radical leader (Peter DeJersey) get in the mix, it all becomes an unpleasantly lurid muddle that director Roger Donaldson ("The World's Fastest Indian") can't begin to escape.

The Band's Visit

Info: Opens today at the Broadway Centre Cinemas; rated PG-13 for brief strong language; in Arabic, Hebrew and broken English with subtitles; 83 minutes.

People everywhere, whether Arab or Israeli, are mostly the same - that's the unassuming message of this unassuming little comedy from Israel. A police orchestra from Egypt arrives to perform in Israel, but ends up on the wrong bus and temporarily stranded in a small desert town. The locals take in the poor musicians, tentatively crossing the language barrier by talking in broken English (which is what disqualified the film from Oscar contention). Director-writer Eran Kolirin creates some charming vignettes, such as the young musician (Saleh Bakri) serenading a bus-station employee with Chet Baker's version of "My Funny Valentine," or the tender relationship between Tawfiq (Sasson Gabai), the band's precision-minded conductor, and Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), a diner owner who offers hospitality to the wayward musicians. These are little gems in a small, but sweet, movie.