Being Julia: Critic Reviews

It has enough surprises to keep you guessing, and for Annette Bening it's the liveliest of comebacks.

Playing a star of the prewar London theater uneasily stepping into middle age, Annette Bening manages a hectic plot with glamour and aplomb.

Annette Bening gets the role of a lifetime in Being Julia, and she runs off with the movie.

Bening makes the movie into something finer still. She digs into a pagoda-size heap of roles and roles-within-roles and pulls them all out, one by one, deftly.

May lack originality but makes up for it in sheer bravado and really nice clothes.

This is Bening's field day, and she fends off all comers with a performance that's astonishing for both its happy invention and technical overkill.

Bening's comic gifts make the most of Ronald Harwood's witty screenplay.

Even with the whimsically understated Irons as the oblivious husband and that lion Michael Gambon as the ghost of Julia's acting teacher, director Istvan Szabo's movie leaves no impression.

An intelligently witty comedy that boasts the sort of performance from Annette Bening that had wags predicting an Academy Award nomination months ago.

The 1930s touches, including a selection of background music, are beguiling.

Just because it's meringue does not mean that there are not genuine pleasures to be found in this light comedy.

Playing a West End stage queen in the otherwise musty Being Julia, Bening has a high time strutting her good/bad stuff.

I liked the movie in its own way, while it was cheerfully chugging along, but the ending let me down.

Bening shines, and the film shines too.

Boasting a bewitching performance by Annette Bening as a 1930s theater queen who rules the West End as Victoria did her empire, Being Julia is a feather-light diversion about a creature who acts her life and lives her roles.

Being Julia isn't perfect; but Bening is, and that makes the film sing.

Bening brings such vitality to the role that she sweeps aside all the quibbles, and you have to sit back and enjoy what is a masterly performance by a great actor playing a great actor.

I enjoyed watching Ms. Bening in close to top form, and I think you will, too.

A minor affair.

[Bening] pulls out all the stops playing a limelight-loving stage diva in 1930s London, and her vivacious performance should guarantee her a spot on Oscar's list of Best Actress nominees.

It is Bening that's worth the price of admission. She makes even the corniest line ring true.

Movies don't get much more inoffensively middlebrow than Being Julia.

There's no question that the source material and the screenwriter make for a natural fit.

Bening slips into this role naturally and wholly.

Being Julia is one of the most uneven affairs I have watched in a theater this year. It's like two movies that have been inelegantly grafted together.