Delicious Treat! Encore!

Rating: 10/10 (2 July 2006)

Here is the best compliment you might want to pay a movie: I want to see it again and again. Here is one of this summer's true guilty pleasures, a film that showcases an amazing, incandescent, and scathing turn by Ms. Meryl Streep. She should be recognized as the best this year has to offer. Her editor from hell has to be one of the best female performances of the last fifty year, a role that is funny, scary, intelligent, and delivered by impeccable comedic timing by one of our greatest living actresses.
The film glides, with no dead time, in a little less than two hours. For most of the time, we are given insight into a world that would have been perfect as one Darwin's studies and more than proves his theories: only the strong will survive. Hathaway might lack some of the experience that Streep has, but her performance is almost flawless. She is the innocent that learns to deal with impossible odds and looks good doing it.
This is a sharp script that demonstrates that a good screenplay can throw sparks when it's written with knowledge, skill, and care, and in the hands of actors like Streep, Tucci, and Hathaway, it can even catch fire. I could go on lavishing praises on Streep's perfection; let it suffice to say that a movie with a cold adversary, able to to turn humans to mush with a single look or a venomous phrase is much more enjoyable than any mythical rehash that pretends to have a heart, or gasp! worse, save the world when the hero in question can't even show a soul who he really is or wants.
It's time to see why original material can makes us cheer and run back to the multiplex and I'd rather have a battle of the wits than a battle of the witless.