A single tank is sent into a small town that has already been bombed by the Israeli Air Force. Inside the tank are four young men: Herzel (Oshri Cohen), the loader; Assi (Itay Tiran), the commander; Yigal (Michael Moshonov), the driver; and Shmuel (Yoav Donat), the gunner. For all of them, this is their first taste of war. The first day of fighting pushes all four of these men past anything they were trained for. For who can be trained to fire on unarmed civilians, to plow their way through streets that just hours before teemed with life, to see the blood and havoc that war creates and not let it change and effect their humanity.

The other film that is constantly being brought up when one speaks of Lebanon is Waltz with Bashir, the foreign picture Oscar contender of 2008. Both of them deal with the same war and the same psychological trauma it inflicted on its soldiers, but in wholly different ways. This film showed me an entirely new angle to war, one I had not seen in any war film. The closest comparison that comes to mind is the German film Das Boot but even in that film the sense of confinement doesn’t feel this suffocating. It is impressive that I felt the same heart-pounding, dizzying feeling I got from the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan from sections of this film and, as I’ve said, the camera never leaves the inside of the tank.

When the gunner is looking out his scope, we get to see some sunshine. We get to see a family torn apart. We get to see a soldier bleed out. We get to see inside a travel agency and have a weird feeling in the pits of our stomachs as the crosshairs of the cannon rests upon a picture of the Twin Towers. Most times with any slight movement the turret moans and creaks in protest, but as with any gimmick there are other times when this is cheated, when empathy is being attempted and the whirrs and clanks would get in the way, so they are left out all together. Apart from this story necessary hitch, the rest of the sound design makes it feel like the world is about to come crushing down around us. The only real gripe I have is that the score is sometimes misaligned and did not add to what I was watching. However, that is a small quibble for a film I honestly and whole heartedly respect.

The first thing that struck me as I was watching this film was how confident the filmmaking felt. For only being the second film that Samuel Maoz has ever directed and first one written, you can feel how much he knew this story and exactly how best to portray it. He was able to take what could have been a gimmick and made it impressive. If I venture to read more into it than may be there, it showed how myopic the “war machine” is. The young men, specifically the gunner, can’t really see most of the destruction that their shells are creating. One of God’s little blessings. Just as the people who sit in plush chairs and push pens across paper to declare war cannot see the destruction they cause. Like I said, that may not be what Samuel was going for, but it feels apropos.

Jennifer’s Body

The film is based in a town called ‘Devil’s Kettle’ and revolves around the friendship between two teenage girls, Jennifer (Megan Fox) and Needy ( Amanda Seyfried). As her name suggests, Needy dotes on Jennifer and clings to every offering of friendship she doles out. The two are polar opposites, with Jennifer being the school’s most desired female and Needy being her uncool sidekick. The friendship takes a severe beating when after a virgin sacrifice gone wrong, Jennifer transforms into an evil demon with an appetite for human flesh.

The main problem with the movie is that too many things go unexplained. Jennifer turns into a demon but it is never really explained what type of demon she is. It’s clear that she is evil, but it’s not clear what happened to make her evil. All we are told is that an occult sacrifice has gone wrong. Flashbacks take us to a gruesome knife attack on Jennifer, which apparently kills her. Then the transformation happens. We do not see the transformation take place and no proper explanation is given, so the viewer is just left confused.

The soundtrack is the best thing about the movie. It is very retro cool and actually has the effect of keeping you engaged with the film. All the songs are well timed, and match the action that they are being played though. Without them, I probably wouldn’t have been able to watch the film to the end.

Amanda Seyfried is good at playing the long suffering friend ‘Needy’, but her transition from uncool friend to mentally unstable is not that convincing. Megan Fox is pouty as usual playing Jennifer and it’s easy to understand why every guy in the school wants to date her. It’s less easy to understand the random lesbian scene between Jennifer and Needy, which seems completely unnecessary. Needy does not appear to be attracted to women and actually has a serious boyfriend who she is obviously in love with. The lesbian kiss seems to be nothing more than a cheap stunt by the filmmakers to get more men to see the movie.

To conclude, Jennifer’s Body is poorly planned and disappointing. It is quite a cool and hip concept but not enough attention was paid to the dialogue or plot. As a result, it leaves the viewer feeling unsatisfied and unconvinced. I’d pay good money for the soundtrack, but not for the movie.

Starring: Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Adam Brody

Dir: Karyn Kusama

Since 1945, the world has gone from two nuclear weapons to over 23,000 nuclear warheads. We’ve come a long way, baby. It would take just one-megaton bomb exploding in the air to throw the earth into a nuclear winter. So we have enough going here on this little planet to really mess things up. To have any bombs active really feels, on all sides, irresponsible. Like children picking up loaded guns, I wonder if our world leaders really comprehend what they have in their hands? The film’s solution to all this madness, disarm all the bombs. It’s great to aim high, but what are we truly trying to accomplish? In a way, the ancient demon we’re trying to destroy is the threat of great weapons in the wrong hands. It’s stopping outwardly antagonistic countries like North Korea and Iran from getting their hands on something that will kill us all. But then, is it right that we should have the bombs and they shouldn’t? As Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is quoted in the film as saying, “If they are good, then why should we be deprived? If they are bad, then why do you have them?” Are we really more reliable, more responsible then they? We, America, are the only country who has ever used one. So really that ancient demon is us – all of us. Every single human on the planet is the reason why the dream of disarming all the nuclear weapons is never going to happen. We are not trusting, nor trustworthy enough to bring the count back down to zero.

There are currently nine countries in the world with confirmed nuclear weapons. Even if by sheer will and luck we are able to get 7 of those countries to completely disarm, the two that are left will fall into a “No, you first” face off. There is just too much power in having something your enemy doesn’t, which won’t allow us to just let it go. We, as a people, do not trust enough to do that. We think, “If I disarm my bombs, and they SAY they’ve disarmed all their bombs, but they really have a secret stash, that will leave me open to attack. I need to have my own secret stash.” And we also think it’s safer for us to have an ace up our sleeve just in case something happens – and in that way we are not trustworthy either. The film is great in that it got me to ponder and talk about all these situations and scenarios. However, call me cynical, but the solution they offer is, I believe, a big pipe dream that will never be realized.

At some undetermined time in the future (or maybe happening now in the present right under our noses) people are able to jack into other’s subconscious and invade their dreams. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the best at doing this and at finding the secrets hidden within those dreams. He is hired by Saito (Ken Watanabe) to place an idea into his business rival’s, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), mind. The request is impossible, the stakes, high, but Cobb needs to do it to gain access back into the United States in order to see his children again. A heist. One last job. So, Cobb puts together a team of people to help him accomplish this task. Ariadne (Ellen Page) is the architect; Yusuf (Dileep Rao) specializes in sleeping potions; Eames (Tom Hardy – stealing every scene he is in) has connections and munitions and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is Cobb’s right hand man. However, what none of them realize is that Cobb has a demon in his head in the form of his ex-wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard) that may materialize and wreak havoc while they are working.

The first person that must be praised is writer/director Christopher Nolan. He has proven himself time and again to be the best director working today. Is there any other director whose track record is so clean? He makes films that are great for film geeks and casual filmgoers alike. The critics love him with great reviews and the audiences love him with great box-office. Besides the misstep that is Insomnia, I am hard pressed to think of anyone else who is so prolific and still so successful. Some will say Tarantino but I would argue that Nolan has broader appeal. I really don’t know why more isn’t being said and written about him. He is a master storyteller. No one else would have been able to cram so much information, at such breakneck speed, into two and a half hours without confusing me, and keep me on the edge of my seat. Each piece of information is given at such a time that it either connects to what happened not so long ago, or so that we can use it to unlock the mystery that is about to come. Other directors would have had pity on the “incompetence” of the audience; they would have watered down the plot to help us understand all the information. Nolan drops us in the middle of a story and trusts us to keep up. He doesn’t bother with details that would weigh down the exposition (How can they jack into other people’s dreams?, Who discovered it?, How does it work?) but instead offers it up for us to buy into if we are to follow him.

The editing is the second thing that must be praised. The editing room is the final place that a director “writes”, and as such Nolan’s cutter, Lee Smith, (the one he’s been working with since Batman Begins) is a genius. For thirty to forty-five minutes in the second act of this film there are between four and six different storylines that are going on simultaneously and interrelate with each other. The deft work done here is like juggling chainsaws. If one of the storylines is botched and left behind, the whole movie is ruined. And someone may lose a limb. Added to that is the unbelievable score that Hans Zimmer, three-time Nolan collaborator, produces. It is as unrelenting as the editing. Looking back, I don’t recall more then five minutes tops that did not have music behind it, pushing it forward, raising the tension. There are a few spots in the film where I wished the movie would have slowed down some in order to let us feel the weight of an issue or a decision, and therefore I feel it lost something special in those moments. However, on the whole, it is a dizzying display of expert editing.

DiCaprio does better here then he has done in quite a while, perhaps because he’s not butchering some accent. His guilt ridden scientist is very similar in tone to the guilt ridden cop he played in Shutter Island. He is perfect in this role. After discovering Tom Hardy in 2008’s Bronson, I have found every role he’s been in mesmerizing. I’m glad he’s going to be getting a chance soon to be a leading man, I just wish it wasn’t as Mad Max. Joseph Gordon-Levitt keeps choosing amazing material to be in, although I do wish the costume crew didn’t always place him in the same dapper-looking clothes – shirt and tie with a cardigan again? Switch it up a bit, huh? And Marion Cotillard is an unrelenting force here. The inside joke of having the music that wakes everyone up be Edith Piaf (Cotillard’s Oscar winning role) was, I feel, inspired. Through it all, nothing was regretted by these dreamweavers.

Finally I want to discuss a scene that was in the trailer – guys floating around a hotel hallway. For some of it, I am still confused as to how they did it. There are two segments to the scene. The first is the fight, a fight that goes from floor to wall to ceiling to wall to floor with such ease and fluidity that even Fred Astaire, in all his dancing glory, couldn’t have dreamed that film would have come this far. That was incredible and I can’t even imagine how the fight choreographer wrapped his brain around the logistics of bringing that all together. The second is the zero gravity portion, long profound stretches of time where lots of people are suspended in zero gravity. That’s where I get confused. I suppose it could be CG, erase the wires that the actors are hanging from, however it appeared to me to be more of what they did for the Apollo 13 film in NASA’s KC-135 reduced gravity aircraft. But how would they have been able to build an entire hotel hallway, room and elevator into one of those aircrafts? It cooks my noodle, but I love it for doing so.

There are a couple of places where the visuals don’t quite work, where the CG lets the filmmakers down. There is a bit more of The Matrix (people being jacked in, not knowing which is the real reality, heck they even had a hot girl that was a complete fabrication of someone’s imagination) and of Vanilla Sky here then I would have liked to see. And though the ideas may not be completely original, the execution is. How you react to the ending and your interpretation of the entire film is more a reflection of your personality and your outlook on life. It’s awesome for a piece of art to mean so many different things to so many different people. Nolan has given us yet another a film that we will be watching for decades to come.

John’s (John C. Reilly) social life is at a standstill and his ex-wife is about to be remarried. Still single after seven years after the breakup of his marriage, he has all but given up on romance, but at the urging of his ex-wife and best friend, Jaime (Catherine Keener), John grudgingly agrees to join her and her fiancé Tim (Matt Walsh) at a party. To his, and everyone else’s surprise, he actually manages to meet someone; the gorgeous and spirited Molly (Marisa Tormei). Their chemistry is immediate. The relationship takes off quickly but Molly is oddly reluctant to take the relationship beyond John’s house. Confused, he follows her home and discovers the other man in Molly’s life; her son Cyrus (Jonah Hill). A 21-year-old new age musician, Cyrus is his mom’s best friend and shares an unconventional relationship with her. Cyrus will go to any lengths to protect Molly and is definitely not ready to share her with anyone, especially John. Before long, the two are locked in a battle of wits for the woman they both love. It’s a new twist on the old love triangle plot.

This film was made in an unconventional way. Instead of blocking the scenes – preplanning where the actors would stand when they say their lines so that they can be lit properly – the Duplass brothers lit the entire set so that their actors could move about freely and spontaneously thus encouraging the natural feel of their mumblecore entrees. Unfortunately, what it also does is confuse the cameraman. Since they do not know where the actors are going to be at any particular time, the camera work becomes shoddy, zooming in and out wildly, going out of focus when the actors get too close or too far from the camera. It almost looks like they are shooting a documentary. It was this unrefined style that initially turned me off to the whole mumblecore genre. It just isn’t something I dig. To me it comes off as being sloppy and uncaring. I also can’t stand slice-of-life type of films. If I want to see natural (read: boring) people do regular (read: extremely boring) things, I could stay at home and save my $12 and my two hours. That said, I really wasn’t looking forward to this film. On top of that, the trailers didn’t really sell this film properly. It was pushing an all out comedy, but I knew enough to know not to expect it. So I came into this film with all that prejudice of mine, and yet the acting and how delicately the directors handled the situations quickly pulled me out of my funk. It became just a change in style, neither good nor bad, just different.

John C Reilly is a master actor and a joy to watch in anything he does. His relationship with Catherine Keener is interesting to say the least. As exes, they act far more friendly and supportive then any separated couples I’ve ever met. John takes advantage of his ex’s friendship and, as Cyrus starts butting his way into Molly and John’s relationship, John starts becoming the Cyrus in Jaime and Tim’s relationship. Seeing him in this film, as a lead actor was an inspired choice, however he was shown up in the improvising area by Marisa Tormei. His delivery is short and choppy, he stammers constantly. Her delivery is smooth and polished and feels far more professional then either of her male counterparts. She lifts the entire film into a higher caliber. Jonah Hill has, with the Apatow troupe, gotten a lot of improv training in comedy and most of the all out gut-busting moments belong to him.

There are three moments in the film that really brought everything together for me, where the emotions completely congealed and I seriously fell in love with the characters and this movie. In these scenes two characters are talking, however the scene starts on the two people talking to each other, and as we continue to hear them talking, it cuts away to the same two people in other, disparate but related, scenarios and back again, all of this over a great piece of heartfelt music. It was in these times where I could see glimpses of how these directors really had a grasp on how to manipulate the cinematic art to do their bidding. I hope to see them continue to grow.

The concept behind the main story is actually rather sweet. On a pre-honeymoon to Verona, Sophie (Amanda Seyfreid) comes across the lengendary wall and balcony where Romeo supposedly courted Juliet Capulet in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. Women from all across the world visit the attraction and write letters to Juliet asking her for help. These letters are then replied to by a group of women who call themselves ‘Juliet’s secretaries’. Sophie finds a letter from fifty years ago that had gotten lodged in a gap in the wall. The letter is from a confused young british woman called Claire who has just jilted her fiancee because she was afraid her family would disapprove of the match. Although the woman will now be an old lady, Sophie decides to reply to the letter; an action which leads to the chain of events that take up the rest of the film. On receiving this late reply, Claire jumps on a plane and comes to Verona hoping to find her long lost love Lorenzo and apologise to him for her cowardice.

Nice simple storyline. Where did it all go wrong?

The two main men in the film were completely unbelievable and ridiculous. Christopher Egan plays Claire’s grandson Charlie with one of the stupidest British accents i’ve ever come across. Instead of trying to sound like a normal english person, it’s like he’s trying to impersonate a member of the royal family. It’s not obvious why he is talking so posh, since his grandmother’s accent is nothing like that. During the course of the film he is supposed to go from rude and offensive to charming and kind, but this transition does not work at all and although he comes across as slightly more likeable than his love rival, he’s really just the better of two evils. Gael Garcia Benal plays Sophie’s fiance and considering he’s proved himself to be a magnificent actor in films like The Motorcycle Diaries and can’t be short on work offers, I have no idea what possessed him to get involved in this film. This is the first English speaking role i’ve seen him in and I can only hope the next is better, as he really was terrible. He plays the role eccentrically and over the top, but he does this so excessively that it’s hard to comprehend why Sophie got together with him in the first place. To be fair, he was working with a poor script though.

Some of the dialogue was so bad that I couldn’t help but laugh in disbelief. In the pivotal scene where Charlie and Sophie declare their love for one another, Charlies doesn’t just say ‘I love you’, but makes a ridiculous speech about loving her ‘madly’, ‘deeply’, ‘passionately’. Pass me a bucket please. Even the soundtrack was predictable and cheesy. Taylor Swift’s song ‘Love Story’ was played during the happy ending. Need that bucket again.

Starring: Amanada Seyfreid, Christopher Egan, Vanessa Redgrave

Dir: Gary Winick

There are no bad performances in the film, but the stand-out performance is from Rob Corddry as the suicidal and manic Lou. He is bitter and outrageous and his destructive tendencies tend to make it difficult for his friends to be around him. Rob Corddry plays Lou with a lot of energy and jumpiness, which makes the character seem even more unstable and unpredictable.

It was also nice to see John Cusack in a comedy that’s actually funny for once. His last few attempts at comedy, including the terrible Must Love Dogs were lacking in any humour.

The film revolves around four dysfuntional men. Three of these guys: Adam (Cusack), Lou, and Nick (Craig Robinson), were best mates in high school but have lost touch over the years, largely because they stopped liking each other. The fourth in the group is the teenage nephew of Adam, and is a geek who likes to spend all his time playing computer games, rather than doing anything remotely sociable. These four are brought together when Lou attempts to commit suicide and since he has no interested relatives, his old friends are called upon to help raise his spirits.

In order to cheer Lou up, they take him to a ski resort they used to go to in the 80s. When they arrive at the resort though, they find it is no longer the desirable place it used to be. The only upside to the place is that their room has a working hot tub. They surround the tub with copious amounts of alcohol, jump in, and start partying. Somehow, during the course of their partying, the hut tub takes them back in time and when they wake up the next day they realise they are back in the 1980s.

It is never made very clear what caused this time travel, but since it’s not a film that you are meant to take very seriously, you shouldn’t really care about this, and if you do, RELAX.

Crispin Glover’s role as the one armed bell boy provides the best laughs in the film. When the film goes back in time he is in possession of both of his arms, and the director plays with the viewer’s morbid curiousity as we hope to discover how he loses his arm. You know he’s going to lose the arm during the course of the film, but you have no idea how. There are numerous close shaves before the arm eventually comes off, and these near misses create the only real suspense in the film.

Overall I enjoyed Hot Tub Time Machine. It kept me engaged and I didn’t find the time dragged at all. My only problem with the film was that I felt it could have been funnier. Although the jokes are flowing throughout, there are no real laugh-out-loud moments. It consistently makes you chuckle, but nothing more substantial. There were no surprises, and except for its ridiculous title, there is nothing very memorable about it.

Dir: Steve Pink

Starring: John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke

Jesse Eisenberg, still doing his best Michael Cera impersonation (God bless him), does an adequate job being a dutiful and long suffering lackey. He is the reason this film is getting a release at all, as he is the only known name in the entire roster, and I guess they figured they could release the film on his recent success in Zombieland and Adventureland. Carter Little wrote the music, which was often overpowering, (Michael O’Connell has his hand in this as well), although I did enjoy their attempt at wit by placing the Westminister chimes throughout the score as if to show how time is slipping away from K. Roth Binew. Ha ha! So witty.

There are places in the film where the actors physically pause for the laughter as if they are playing before a live studio audience…but the laughter in my audience never came. It is very difficult to express why and/or how this film misses the mark and I think the difficulty in the explanation is part of the mark-missing in itself. Let me explain. The film wants to be over the top, both with its characters and their audacity and with the settings and situations they are placed in. However, it feels that Tryon is too timid and decides to play it safe. It’s not quite tongue-in-cheek and it’s not quite convincing me that these are real characters. The movie lies in some middle lukewarm ground where everything is simple and boring. There is a song that K. Roth Binew sings, his final hurrah as it were where he shucks off this mortal coil and says goodbye to his acquaintances. The event itself is big. The character, to Mr. O’Connell’s great credit, is played very big. The song, however, felt understated, underdeveloped and under whelming. Perhaps in a different director’s hands this would have been a cult house classic – certainly something I would enjoy. In fact, I feel this film is begging for an immediate remake. I would love to see this story with most of this cast in a capable director’s hands. Tryon seemed to have been watching “Rushmore” on an endless loop while making this film and I can see what he was going for. Honestly, he just lacked the confidence to be brazen, to really let K. Roth Binew loose, to let him be an utterly contemptible jerk and, perhaps, hated by the audience. That’s where he was written to be. That’s where O’Connell was playing him. Instead, Tryon pulled way back on the reins, too scared that his protagonist was not going to be adored and therefore landed in the queasy no-man’s land of apathy.

The gravest sin, and the one that finally pushed me completely out of the fanciful world this film was attempting to weave around me, came at the end of the film. I would say that this is a spoiler because there is a tissue-thin veil of doubt the film tries to throw over our eyes about the finality of K. Roth Binew’s life at the end of the day. And perhaps it is because of that shred of doubt that I was in such a quandary about what happened. In any case, if you care at all, don’t read further and know that I would recommend waiting until the re-imagining to watch this film.

K. Roth Binew dies. Shocker, I know, but he times it very well with the ending of that final “big hurrah” song I was describing earlier and lands in his coffin, standing up, arms folded across his chest (if only he could have been holding a lily). The problem is, Michael O’ Connell CAN NOT STOP MOVING! And it’s not a subtle, “Did I just see what I think I saw?” kind of thing. This was serious hand twitching, chest heaving, Adams apple moving going on here. It was to such a point that, when none of the mourners who were staring intently at him even mention it, I felt that they were either in some serious denial or that they had all gone mad. “Binew is going to get up at any minute now” I thought to myself. Then they nailed shut the coffin and Mills Joaquin takes him away. “He’s taking Binew to a secluded place where he can open the coffin” I thought to myself. Then Mills Joaquin places the coffin on a boat in a river and sets it ablaze. “Oh, so Mills Joaquin wasn’t in on the gag and K. Roth Binew will soon burst out of the flaming coffin and it will be funny” I thought to myself. Then the screen went black and the end credits started to roll. Then I finally realized that it was not the audience at the living wake who could or would not see the dead man moving, it was the director. And it was then that I decided that if the director, Sol Tryon, could not be bothered to care about his film, then neither could I.

The second part of the film for me is utterly astounding and makes my mouth water for what the director will do next. The way that Daniel Berber handled the color, the texture, the mannerisms and rough aggressiveness of the streets and the children they spawn was amazing. It really made me wish he had chosen a better project to put this talent to. I wonder what he would have done with Sin Nombre, Bully or even transplanting a City of God type tale into England. He could bring those kinds of storylines to brilliant life. I don’t want him to get pigeon-holed, but from what I saw here, I just want him to fan this flame a little more and see the skill that’s began shining to come to full fruition before he moves on. The cinematographer, Martin Ruhe, as well must be complimented for making such raw and gritty images look absolutely beautiful.

It must be said that the kind of actions of violence portrayed in this film are not over exaggerated. The police advisors for the film, it is mentioned in the notes for the movie, had far more shocking stories to tell. That said this film does not come down praising or condemning either one side or the other, as well it shouldn’t. If the intention of the film was to entertain, it did so very well. However, if the intention was to inform, to educate or to stir something in the hearts of its audience and make a difference, it missed completely. It is difficult to do so when your hero’s response to violence is more violence.

Julie and Julia is based on two true stories. It shows the stories of Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and Julie Powell (Amy Adams), two women who made names for themselves through the art of cooking. Julia Child is a well known name in America as she the book ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ and appeared on Televison cooking shows. The film covers Julia’s life  from the late 1940′s to the early 1960′s, starting at the point when she moved to Paris with her husband Paul and discovered her love for cooking. The other story the film tells is the more modern day story of Julie Powell, a failed writer about to turn thirty who doesn’t know where her life is going. In a bid to find some purpose, Julie sets herself the difficult challenge of cooking her way through Julia Child’s massive cookbook and writes a blog about it.

Although the two stories are covering different time periods, they are very much interlinked and mirror each other. The two women are not at all like each other in temperament, but their lives follow similar paths. They both take up cooking to fill up time and find their own purpose and they both find cooking ultimately takes them to success.

Meryl Streep’s accent in the film is very bizarre. She is portraying an American woman, but she sounds like she’s attempting to sound either French or Polish. I can only imagine the odd accent is supposed to emphasise Julia Child’s eccentric nature and larger than life personality, but personally I found it a bit distracting. However, I did find her portrayal of Julia Child otherwise adorable. She’s a woman who seems unafraid of anything and she’s not afraid to show the world exactly who she is. She joins a cooking class which is solely occupied by men and she proves herself to be as fearless as any of them in the kitchen. She always seems happy, even under immense pressure and she never gives up.

Julie Powell is less likeable, which is surprising considering she’s being played by ‘nice girl next door’ type Amy Adams. Although Julie looks like a picture of innocence and sounds sweet as pie, she acts like a proper bitch sometimes, and you can’t help but wonder why her lovely husband puts up with it. She does acknowledge she has behaved badly though, so that helps soften the viewer’s feelings towards her and stops her from looking like a remorseless cow.

You can tell this is a Nora Ephron movie, as although I wouldn’t call the film a romance, the scenes between Julia Child are her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) are incredibly sweet and touching. It’s obvious the pair are besotted with one another, and Ephron makes it clear that without Paul, Julia’s success and happiness would not have been possible. Just as some of Ephron’s other movies such as Sleepless in Seattle and Michael make you believe in soul mates and fariytales, Paul and Julia’s relationship in this movie leaves you believing in true love.

Since this film is largely about cooking, i’ll sum it up using cooking terms. Julie and Julia is ‘light and fluffy, with a pleasant filling.’

Dir: Nora Ephron

Starring: Amy Adams, Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci