Julie & Julia

Meryl Streep is the Bret Favre of acting: She continues to play at a high level while others from her generation have either retired or fallen off. Sure, she’s been phoning it in for years, but her “phoning it in” far surpasses that of her old co-stars De Niro, Pacino, Hoffman, Walken and Woody Allen. Those guys seem old and tired, but Streep has fun phoning it in, and nowhere is that more evident than in Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia. Streep plays the TV chef Julia Child during her time in France, and she has a ball squawking and dithering in a broadly imitative performance. Unfortunately, that’s only one-half of the film; the other is an extremely loose and utterly insipid adaptation of blogger Julie Powell’s memoir that only serves to rewrite Powell as unlikable and incompetent.