The Have and Have Nots

Even thought Oscar season has wrapped real movie mavens know that world class films pop up all year round. For sure, don't miss the contenders, the Coen Brothers, the vision of P.T. Anderson and Diablo Cody-esque language tweaks. But there are quality films that never raise the eyebrow of the casual movie goer.
The Band's Visit hails from Israel and resembles the milieu of a Jarmusch film. The laughs are an afterglow of the dialogue. and the situations linger with deadpan humor. A group of Egyptian civil servants, on tour in their alter egos as a brass band, get lost in a suburb in Israel while looking for their gig. People come together in friendly and touching ways throughout the night when the band, without enough money for proper lodgings, crashes out in various people's apartments. This film was actually selected as the Israeli entry of foreign film but ruled ineligible because it contains more English than Arabic or Hebrew.
City of Men continues the stories of the impoverished in Rio de Janeiro. The film City of God was a sensation of early 2000 cinema and launched the international career of Fernando Meirelles and was followed by a Brazilian television series called City of Men. This film, Cidade dos Homens, continues in the tradition of City of God in the sense of vast plot development and lot of characters, although there are two central friends and the main action revolves around an all out drug war. That the whole thing works as pure crime drama without the flair of Meirelles is just fine.
Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day made me squirm for the first hour, but then it grew on me. The story unfolds over the span of a day. The director starts out with badly staged screwball antics that come off as purely theatrical. The film seems at odds with itself. Miss Pettigrew (Frances McDormand), a governess, finds herself homeless and penniless after her employers kick her out on the street. She scams her way into the apartment of kept women and aspiring singer Delysia (Amy Adams way, way over the top). Delysia isn't so much a slut as gullible yet she has three constant boyfriends and Pettigreww earns her keep by keeping them at bay. Miss Pettigrew kicks up the style in the third act and at least from then plays pretty well. Okay not as well as Charlie Bartlett or Definitely Maybe. But that's last month's flavor and we're already looking forward to spring.