In Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman's adaptation of 2003 bestseller The Nanny Diaries, heroine Annie Braddock (played by Scarlett Johansson on auto-pilot) finds herself thronged by Upper East Side mothers, all vying to hire her as a caretaker for their children. Diaries' strength is in its brutal social exposés of uptowners' oblique racism and entitlement (as a white, American-born girl, Annie notes, "I was the Chanel bag of nannies"), but such moments are frustratingly rare. The film interests itself less in satirizing bigotry than in wallowing in the schadenfreude of multimillion-dollar divorce settlements. Mr. (Paul Giamatti) and Mrs. X (a Botox-numb Laura Linney) do their best to keep their five-year-old son, Grayer, from interfering with their busy schedules (which consist of making fortunes and spending them, respectively). The film panders to our basest voyeuristic impulses, offering us Mrs. X's inner pain on a platter when she gets too unbearably self-important to stand. Comparisons to the far superior The Devil Wears Prada seem deliberately courted, but Diaries could have been the superior film, had it not declawed its attacks on the elitist Manhattan society that the book's fans both detest and envy. — Annsley Chapman
