It isn’t difficult to pick the lone winner in the crapfest we call the January release calendar.  Here’s a hint: It doesn’t involve a crazy black guy in a fat suit, and it’s not based on a videogame.  If that didn’t narrow the focus a bit, we’ll cut to the chase: Nanny McPhee is the cat’s pajamas, employing just about every British thespian who hasn’t already been gobbled up by the Harry Potter juggernaut.  And they’re all turned up to 11, making Nanny a bizarrely colorful, over-the-top mash-up of Roald Dahl-esque Edwardian dramedy and the cover of the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request.

Colin Firth (Where the Truth Lies) plays Cedric Brown, a recently-widowed owner of a funeral home who, instead of one precocious Vada Sultenfuss, is the father to seven hellions – led by Love Actually’s Thomas Sangster – who have run off the area’s last au pair in record time by pretending to eat a sibling.  Materializing like and being hired as quickly as Shary Bobbins, McPhee (Emma Thompson, already a Potter goblee) explains she’ll teach the Brown spawn five important lessons, but never gives any details about how the completion of each of the aforementioned tasks will make one of her horrifying, witch-like features (hairy warts, uni-brow, record-breaking snaggletooth) disappear.

Meanwhile, Mr. Brown is given an ultimatum by his great aunt Adelaide (Angela Lansbury, making her first appearance in a feature film in over 20 years): Marry by the end of the month, or I’ll stop the endowments that allows you to keep your family together.  Cedric, naturally, notices not his dreamy scullery maid, Evangeline (Kelly Macdonald, a recent Golden Globe-nominee for HBO’s The Girl in the Café), but instead a creature more monstrous than Joan Rivers herself – the cock-hungry Selma Quickly (Celia Imrie, from the Bridget Jones pictures).  Will the kids be able to combine their recently-acquired manners with their knack for mischief and run her off before it’s too late?  Will Cedric finally realize what a dish Evangeline is?  Is that really Vera Drake playing Molly Weasley?  Is Emma Thompson really so vain, she can’t be ugly for the entire film?  Spoiler warning: Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Nanny is the latest picture from Kirk Jones, who made the entertaining (but quite forgettable) Waking Ned Devine.  It was adapted, from Christianna Brand's largely unknown Nurse Matilda books, by Thompson in her first big screen writing endeavor since nabbing an Oscar for Sense & Sensibility a decade ago.  She and everyone else clearly had a ball making it, and I think viewers will have an equally entertaining time watching it, despite the stupid CG donkey.

1:37 – for mild thematic elements, some rude humor and brief language