By PHIL VILLARREAL, Arizona Daily Star

Having been laid off as a governess, lost the suitcase with all her clothes and resorted to dining at a soup kitchen, poor Miss Pettigrew is all but kneeling in the 1930s London streets, arms reaching toward the sky, screaming, "Please, Lord, turn my life into a makeover movie!"

Like "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," "Starting Out in the Evening" was groomed for an Oscar run late last year but didn't get any tugs on its line.

It's good to be king when your choices for mistresses resemble Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson.

It's unfair to expect lightning to strike again for Francis Ford Coppola, who would go on as one of history's great directors even if he never made another film.

Sunday is Oscar night, and the major awards seem pretty predictable.Of course, that's what the backers of "Brokeback Mountain" thought going into the ceremony two years ago, when their expectations were crushed by "Crash" in a major upset.

Any movie that requires a video game to fill gaps in the story raises a red flag.

Writer/director Adam Brooks is so adept at recycling, he deserves an award from Greenpeace.

How odd that a filmmaker who built a reputation as a sensitive, open-eared purveyor of multifaceted race relations would so underplay ethnic tension in the hotbed of the Jim Crow South.

"Over Her Dead Body" is a bad movie. I get that. Its premise is dumb, the writing is sorta lame and its star, Eva Longoria Parker, is annoying in her lead role as Kate, the ghost of a self-obsessed bride-to-be who comes back to spoil her intended husband's romance.

Watching "Lynch" is like going to the zoo and catching the tiger during his nap instead of feeding time.The profile of surrealist filmmaker David Lynch -- inventively shot but short on substance -- leaves you scratching your head just the way many of Lynch's films do. Unlike this documentary, however, his movies don't usually bore you along the way.