To me Lee Daniels’ The Butler is a missed opportunity at best.

In 1979, there was a superb 9 hour TV mini-series called Backstairs at the White House which followed the true story of mother and daughter domestics Maggie and Lillian Rogers, brilliantly played by Olivia Cole and Leslie Uggams, through eught administrations, telling their own personal stories as well as those of the presidents they served from Taft through Eisenhower. Their story begins on the day of Kennedy’s inauguration as Lillian Rogers Park (1897-1997) begins her retirement after thirty years of service. She looks back on her life as she encounters President Taft as a child while her mother began her own thirty year career working as a maid in the White House. The leisurely pace of the mini-series format allows for a fully textured look at the lives of the two women both inside and outside of their jobs, as well as allowing flesh and blood portrayals of the very different presidents and their families during their time of service. Two episodes are devoted to each administration and everything is covered from the death of the first Mrs. Wilson to the second Mrs. Wilson’s secretly running the country while her husband was incapacitated from a stroke to the Teapot Dome scandal to the death of a Coolidge child to the forgotten men of World War I during Hoover’s administration to the eccentricities of the Roosevelts, the stark contrast of the Trumans and the coldness of the Eisenhowers. Many fine actors are given their due through the course of these events including Victor Buono and Julie Harris as the Tafts; Robert Vaughn, Kim Hunter and Claire Bloom as the Wilsons; George Kennedy and Celeste Holm as the Hardings; Ed Flanders and Lee Grant as the Coolidges; Larry Gates and Jan Sterling as the Hoovers; John Anderson and Eileen Heckart as the Roosevelts; Harry Morgan and Estelle Parsons as the Trumans and Andrew Duggan and Barbara Barrie as the Eisenhowers. The downstairs, or more accurately, backstairs, staff is given full range as well with such equally fine actors as Lou Gossett, Jr.; Robert Hooks; Bill Overton; Helena Carroll and Cloris Leachman among the players.

Eugene Allen (1919-2010) was a real life White House butler whose served under eight presidents from Truman to Reagan, was invited to a State dinner for the German chancellor by Nancy Reagan and was invited to attend Obama’s inaugural. There the real life similarities end in Lee Daniels’ The Butler, a film about a fictional White House butler named Cecil Gaines who served seven presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan. He had two sons, whereas the real-life Allen had only one. I guess Allen’s life wasn’t dramatic enough for the film-makers so they invented a second son and placed these fictional characters in events from 1926 to 2008 that better served their purposes. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that a life of service to seven or eight presidents deserves a broader scope than a mere two hour film can give it. It should have been done as a mini-series which might have been as good as Backstairs at the White House.

Instead we get brief characterizations of five of the presidents and newsreel footage of two of them. Robin Williams as Eisenhower makes no impression at all. James Marsden has some decent scenes as Kennedy but the actor seems too young for the part. Liev Shreiber is simply grotesque as Lyndon Johnson and John Cusack mostly mutters his way through Nixon. Alan Rickman breathes some life into Reagan and Jane Fonda, despite her stunt casting, is charm itself as Nancy Reagan in what seems like just two minutes of screen time.

The central performances of Forest Whitaker in the title role; Oprah Winfrey as his alcoholic wife; David Oyelowo as their eldest son and Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Lenny Kravitz as fellow butlers are more fully fleshed out, giving each of them more time to build their characters. All are convincing, but the film’s opening sequence in which Gaines’ mother (Mariah Carey) is raped and his father shot at point blank range by the rapist (Alex Pettyfer) while the rapist’s mother (grandmother?) played by Vanessa Redgrave makes the young boy a house servant seems part of a different movie.

A better film about the black experience in contemporary America is Ryan’s Coogler’s Fruitvale Station about the last day in the life of 22 year-old Oscar Grant, the Hayward, California man who was shot and killed in an incident at Oakland’s Fruitvale BART station in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 2009.

The film presents Grant as a struggling father of a four year-old who has spent time in jail and recently lost his job for showing up late one too many times. He has a loving relationship with his daughter, his girlfriend (Melonie Diaz) and his family, the heart of which is his mother, played with fierce dignity by Octavia Spencer. Spencer who won an Oscar for comic performance in The Help two years ago, gives a richer, more nuanced performance here as the mother who tells her son to take the train on New Year’s Eve because it’s safer than driving, only to have her suggestion come back and bite her in the film’s ironic ending. If Spencer hadn’t won the Oscar two years ago, she would be a much stronger candidate for this year’s supporting actress Oscar than she was.

While Spencer gives the film’s strongest performance, all the parts are played extremely well under the direction of first time director Coogler, including both Jordan and Diaz who should have major careers ahead of them.

Destin Cretton’s feature length debut,Short Term 12 is an expanded version of his similarly titled 2008 short about life in a group foster care facility. Brie Larson is the supervisor of the titled unit 12 and John Gallagher Jr. is both one of her staff members and her lover. The two actors shine as do virtually all of the supporting cast members in this excellent little film reminiscent of the troubled teen films of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Larson has a featured role in James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now, a film which has gotten inexplicably good reviews. A John Hughes 1980s teenage angst film wannabe, it’s a character study about a teenage alcoholic (Miles Teller) who treats his new girlfriend (Shailene Woodley) as a doormat while trying to win back former girlfriend Larson who has moved on. Only after receiving a long overdue lecture from his mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh) does he wake up and realize Woodley is the girl for him. Is it too late? The film ends with one of those coy “will she or won’t she” endings that is the refuge of lazy writers who want to have it both ways for audiences of opposing views.

A romantic comedy for audiences of a certain age, Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said is the first film from this writer-director since 2002’s Lovely and Amazing that I haven’t totally abhorred thanks to the low-key charm of Julia Louis-Dreyfuss as a middle-aged masseuse and the late James Gandolfini as the object of her affection. See it for them.

Classic films getting very nice Blu-ray upgrades include 1927’s Sunrise and 1967’s In the Heat of the Night, both of which look better than ever. The same can’t be said for 1985’s A Chorus Line, the flop film version of the Broadway smash which doesn’t look any better on Blu-ray than it did on DVD.

This week’s new releases include Captain Phillips and Blue Jasmine.