Julie & Julia: Critic Reviews

Though hardly a perfect souffle, Julie & Julia is the movie American foodie culture has been waiting for. It hooks you up, happily, to your inner top chef.

Julie & Julia proceeds with such ease and charm that its audacity is easy to miss.

A dose of stodgy comfort food in the form of a complacent, mediocre film, with an exasperatingly flaccid and anti-climactic ending.

It's a light and entertaining treat, with winning performances, sharp writing and some happy surprises.

Streep and Tucci enjoy a terrific, infectious onscreen chemistry as soul mates for whom food and entertaining were part of one long, sensuous continuum.

This is blissful moviemaking. Much of the pleasure we have in watching it comes from seeing Tucci and, obviously, Streep connect. But it's also the effortlessness Ephron reveals in bringing it all together.

If Ephron is to be criticized for treating Powell like a soggy sitcom creation, she (along with Streep) should be celebrated for rendering Child flesh and blood -- all passion and pleasure, even during moments of self-doubt.

Well, what do you know? It turns out there was an accent Meryl Streep hadn't yet tackled -- and, as anyone might guess, she handles it with remarkable finesse.

The joys of the Julia parts are cumulative, and addictive. The Julie parts keep forcing us to go cold turkey.

From Child's warbling, New England-by-way-of-Paris voice to her towering yet curiously lighthearted physical presence, Streep gets everything technically right about the woman.

What an expression of the joy of cooks and cooking Julie & Julia turns out to be.

When actors like these are cooking, it's better than haute cuisine.

Julie & Julia is one of the gentlest, most charming American movies of the past decade.

Julie & Julia is not lacking in entertainment value, especially with the Streep performance. But if the men had been portrayed as more high-spirited, it might have taken on intriguing dimensions.

One can't help but wonder if Ephron would've been better off focusing exclusively on Child: She's simply more interesting screen company. But Ephron's commercial touch serves her well here.

The main reason for seeing this is Meryl Streep's deft comic performance as the fluttery TV chef.

Like Nora Ephron's captivating film, Streep's performance is haute cuisine disguised as comfort food, a complex preparation yielding effects both broadly entertaining and subtly moving.

Loved the first course, hated the second.

Fluffy, sweet and deliciously delightful, Julie & Julia is a hoot of a movie and a surefire recipe for a good time, assuming of course you can do without robots, superheroes and comics who curse.

Although the calories ultimately are empty, they sure are enjoyable.

This movie is an emerald of enchantment in the current sewer of cinematic trap rock.

This middling melange of Child biopic and contempo dramedy feels overstuffed and predigested.

Meryl Streep makes such a tasty and larger-than-life Julia in a nostalgically evoked late-'40s Paris that it's worth stomaching the pancake-flat sequences with her supposed early 21st-century counterpart, Julie Powell.

The comedy about a would-be writer's attempt to cook her way through Child's culture-changing cookbook sees Nora Ephron return to her Sleepless in Seattle form.

Child was often imitated but Streep lets us see her jubilant soul.