The Devil Wears Prada.

"For the legions who have suffered the caprice and cruelty of a tyrannical boss, The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger's best-selling roman à clef about a bright young woman's brief period of servitude at a fashion magazine, provides the satisfaction of vicarious payback," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "With her silver hair and pale skin, her whispery diction as perfect as her posture, [Meryl] Streep's Miranda inspires both terror and a measure of awe.... And the movie, while noting that she can be sadistic, inconsiderate and manipulative, is unmistakably on Miranda's side.

Rebecca Traister concurs:

[W]e welcome this summer flick with open arms and find ourselves unexpectedly embracing not the heroine with the heart of gold but the harridan with the soul of steel.

Updated through 7/5.

For all its basic adherence to backlash tropes of the past two decades - the frosty, ill-tempered, exacting, petty, socially dysfunctional female honcho who can't keep her personal life together - The Devil Wears Prada manages to present one of the most nuanced lady bosses ever to grace the silver screen. Devil's presentation of a woman chief who is more than a bloodless billboard on which to project all our anxieties about femininity and professional power may mean that Hollywood has finally come a short way, baby. It has figured out, in an era of Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart and Meg Whitman, how to show us a woman boss who is not a phantasmagorical figure but someone most of us have met, some have worked for, and many are on their way to becoming.

Also in Salon, Stephanie Zacharek assumes the film "is probably supposed to be half fashion fantasy, half satire of the fashion world. What a drag that it's not enough of either."

Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times: "Anna Wintour must be pleased.... [I]t's very clear on who's the star of the show. A serious improvement on the tantrum that inspired it, the movie is funnier and more evenhanded in its point of view. If living well is the best revenge, then being portrayed by Meryl Streep in peak comic form has got to run a close second."

"It's easy to imagine the way most studios would have made the movie: as a broad romantic comedy, where the plucky young heroine not only lands the guy in the end, but gets back at her wicked, evil boss, too," writes Anne Thompson in the Hollywood Reporter. "But that's not what Fox 2000 president Elizabeth Gabler had in mind."

"As adapted by Aline Brosh McKenna, The Devil Wears Prada is crisper, less self-righteous and mercifully shorter than its intermittently funny but interminable source," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly.

Writing in Premiere, Aaron Hillis finds the film "as grossly anti-feminist as the fashion biz itself."

J Hoberman in the Voice: "Streep is the scariest, most nuanced, funniest movie villainess since Tilda Swinton's nazified White Witch." The AV Club's Keith Phipps even finds it "tempting to applaud at the end of her scenes."

Rob Nelson in the City Pages: "This is the umpteenth Hollywood movie about a purportedly talented writer that never bothers to show us anything she wrote. Still, as the line between advertising and editorial grows thinner than this year's model, maybe our heroine has all she needs. In the end, [director David] Frankel cranks up the pop as Andy [Anne Hathaway] works the rush-hour crosswalk, suggesting that the path from Park Avenue to the Pulitzer is just another runway."

David Edelstein in New York: "If there's any drama here, it's slender—maybe a size 2." Adds Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat: "There is not a surprising moment in David Frankel's film, but it goes down easily enough."

Vue Weekly's Josef Braun finds it "a little too blitzed with fussy montages and perky pop songs, but the film manages to coast entertainingly on some of the funniest sequences in a mainstream comedy this year."

The Stranger's Annie Wagner: "A Hollywood movie, I would argue, can do satire, but it can't usually do personal or dishy."

Updates: For the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle, this is "a film that reveals an entire vibrant and sleazy world that most viewers would never have a hint of... To watch it is like being entertained while getting an anthropological crash course."

And it's "a tremendous pleasure to watch," writes Dana Stevens at Slate, even if "Andy's great descent into the ethical underbelly consists of not being the sweetest and most self-sacrificing person on-screen." Also, a rerun of Amanda Fortini's defense of Anna Wintour. Fresher Fortini on the fashion in the film: "More remarkable than what the film gets wrong is how much it gets right."

Update, 7/1:: Along similar lines, Ruth La Ferla checks with insiders for the NYT: "'The hair, the clothes, the furs, the handbags, the editor's apartment, it's very much the heyday of the 80s, which was our flashiest moment to date,' said Tiffany Dubin, a former curator of vintage fashion for Sotheby's. Those elements prompted Ms Dubin to dismiss the film's style with the fashionista's ultimate putdown: 'The people in it are trying a little too hard.'"

Roger Ebert gives the film a mere two stars.

Cinematical's Ryan Stewart: "[T]he movie is a throw-back; a dip of cotton-candy Americana so antiquated that Frank Capra could easily have spun a similar yarn and wrapped it around goings-on at the Bedford Falls newspaper."

Updates, 7/2: A "war movie the likes of which we've never quite seen before," announces Christopher Kelly in the Star-Telegram. "[T]his war will go on being waged: for as long as women want and demand what's rightly theirs; for as long as a glass ceiling exists; and for as long as tough cookies like Andy Sachs and Miranda Priestly keep boldly trying to smash their way through it."

MaryAnn Johanson: "Streep makes Miranda instantly one of the classic, iconic Hollywood villains."

"Meryl Streep vs Duct Tape" at Fametracker. Via Nathaniel R.

Updates, 7/5: Tom Hall: "[W]hen Andrea ultimately walks away from her job, I couldn't help but wonder if she was walking away because she recognized that she shared Miranda's ambitions or if she was rejecting Miranda's values altogether? I think the movie intended to make the latter point, but I don't believe it for a minute."

"In all, this has to be the most devastating boss-lady performance in the history of cinema," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "By comparison, Faye Dunaway's hysterics in Network come off as amusing freak-outs, and Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl is a coarse, leather-lunged shouter."

Posted by dwhudson at June 30, 2006 8:33 AM