If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Adams and McDormond are perfect.OK, this is yet ANOTHER romantic comedy.... same story, different actors. But, because of the skills of the two leads the film glitters.Both Amy and Francis are able to convey worlds of emotion, communication with just a glance. It's a joy just to watch them at work. And that, to me, is what makes this film amazing.Give it a shot.

I agree with most of the positive reviews, but I think more credit should be given to the director, Bharat Nalluri. His directing of Amy Adams and Miss Pettigrew is truly phenomenal. You can achieve perfect timing on the stage, but he makes it even better on film. Were there lots of retakes? When Miss Pettigrew tentatively suggests that Amy just not let the third boyfriend into the flat, and Amy says "I can't do that" "Why" "It's his flat", the perfect timing greatly increases the impact. The true author of a film is usually the director, who bears the ultimate responsibility for its artistic merit. Besides his great timing, Bharat Nalluri, like Hitchcock, ensures that the audience knows exactly what is going on, so that dramatic moments don't lose their impact.

MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY is about transformation. Delysia LaFosse (Amy Adams) is in reality Sarah Grubb from the Pittsburg Steal worker's Grubb. Miss Pettigrew (Frances McDormand, social secretary, is in reality homeless tramp. And Joe Blumfield (Claran Hinds) would prefer to be what he really is: a sock designer rather than designer of lingerie. Sound familiar? A STAR IS BORN (1954 with James Mason and Judy Garland) is about Esther Blodgett being transformed into Vicki Lester. And that movie itself is about Frances Gumm being transformed into Judy Garland. MY FAIR LADY, Liza Doolittle transformed into a lady who speaks the King's English and not Cockney. It is about OEDIPUS--a book about adoption--as Betty Jean Lifton explores in her autobiography TWICE BORN: MEMOIRS OF AN ADOPTED DAUGHTER.And the central question to these transformations: how different would I be without the act that transformed me? Suppose Miss Pettigrew married her beau in 1914 and lived in that cottage with garden? Instead her beau dies in the mud of France in the Great War. And 25 years later, on the eve of WW II, she is a homeless tramp, not living in a cottage with a garden. Miss Pettigrew wants to save Delysia LaFosse from making a mistake that will transform her life into something unsatisfactory if she were to marry the wrong man, of the three men pursuing her. Only one of these men accept her for what and who she is: Sarah Grubb.(That is the core of the movie--Miss Pettigrew wanting to save Delysia from her own fate of an ill-advised marriage. But marrying the wrong person is not the same as losing a person to the fate of war. Here the logic fails. Unless, Miss Pettigrew was more in love with the idea of marrying a soldier off to war, then actually in love with the soldier--which is what the story line ends up silently implying.)This core of the movie--transformation--motivates the movie, motivates the characters. And it's why the audience responds as it does, because there is recognition that is a theme central to the human condition. It posits that transformation changes ineluctably and not in a direction which we would have chosen of our own volition. And the question that all people ask (all adoptees ask): how exactly would my life have been different,if I had not suffered this trauma, If I had not been adopted? And as always, the core to these transformations is about the seedy, the unpleasant, the trauma: whether it's war, or whether it's a sexual escapade that should not have occurred.In the end: Miss Lafosse chooses the right person, Joe Blumfield has found the person to be his wife in Miss Pettigrew, the person whom he has been looking for all his life.It's a charming movie with a serious core. Not a screwball comedy. Though it has hilarious moments. Miss Pettigrew lives for day so that she might live for an eternity,

"Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day" is an old-fashioned, moderately entertaining comedy-of-manners that is never quite as captivating or as scintillating as we keep hoping it will be.This roundelay of love, drawing-room comedy and farcical misunderstandings takes place among the snooty theatrical set in pre-WWII London. Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams) is an ambitious if slightly ditzy American actress who's juggling an assortment of romantic and sexual partners on her way to fame and fortune. Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances MacDormand) is a frumpy, somewhat eccentric, but wise and ethical professional governess who, in her capacity as Delysia's personal "social secretary," helps to steer the morally unfocused ingénue through the shoals of emotional game-playing and artful deception that are practically de rigueur in the social world to which she aspires – only to discover that the two women have more in common with one another than their widely disparate positions on the social scale would lead one to suspect.Based on the novel by Winfred Watson, with screenplay by David Magee and Simon Beaufoy and direction by Bharat Nalluri, "Pettigrew" suffers from creaky plotting, strained comedy routines, and a gruelingly predictable outcome, but the performances are classy (especially by McDormand), the settings rich in atmosphere and ambiance, and the whole thing so entirely inoffensive and good-natured that we can't really complain too much if it isn't all we would like it to be.