Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving weekend. Now its back to the homestretch of 2009 award contenders, starting this morning with Tom Ford's A Single Man (not to be confused with Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man unless it's also exceedingly dull).

Like several of the latecomers noted in my holiday movie preview, A Single Man doesn't have a Tampa Bay arrival date, since it's one of those arty films from a small distributor that works better in regard to award strategy with a slow roll-out, sustaining awareness through the Oscars in March, 2010.

That's also the reason why The Road is only showing at Hyde Park's Cinebistro at this time (and only on 110 other screens in the U.S.). Such movies won't be blockbusters by any stretch of imagination, but manufacturing the appearance being an "event" for moviegoers to seek out can eventually lead to more tickets sold and award nominations/top-10 lists garnered.

A Single Man has a lot of buzz going for Colin Firth's portrayal of a gay man in 1962 Los Angeles whose lover is killed in an auto accident. Julianne Moore is also getting some love as his sympathetic (and glamorously pathetic) friend. Fashion designer Tom Ford makes his filmmaking debut so A Single Man should be suitably classy.

You can't figure out such details from the preview trailers, a wordless pastiche of images including the most closeups of eyes that I've ever seen in a two-minute clip. I'll learn this morning if Ford has any other emotive tricks up his starched sleeve.

One piece of bad news making perfect sense: Oren Moverman's effective wartime drama The Messenger will not open this Friday in select theaters as previously announced. I believed all along that was a mistake since the similarly themed Brothers is set to open nationwide the same day. Pitting them against each other would be box office suicide since there won't be much box office for these movies to share, anyway. Awards? Maybe.

The Messenger stars Ben Foster (keep an eye on this guy during the awards season) and Woody Harrelson (ditto) as soldiers assigned to the U.S. Army's Casualty Notification program; they inform survivors when loved ones are killed in combat. One widow (Samantha Morton) gets a little extra sympathy beyond duty. I've been a fan of The Messenger since its debut at the Sarasota Film Festival eight months ago, so any move protecting its chances of being noticed are fine by me.

Brothers stars Tobey Maguire as a Marine declared missing in action in Afghanistan. His grieving wife (Natalie Portman) gets comforted a bit too intimately by his alcoholic brother (Jake Gyllenhaal). Brothers will open Friday in a limited number of theaters but a screening hasn't been set and deadline's a-comin'.

My money is on The Messenger as the movie that'll be remembered after this distribution skirmish. Check out the trailer and see why: