Julie and Julia (2/5)
Fish Tank (4/5)
Adventureland (4/5)
The September Issue (4/5)
Dorian Gray (3/5)

Can a movie be too sweet for its own good? Watching Julie and Julia, which follows a young New Yorker working her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, feels like being force-fed a dish of candied pecans, smothered in honey, washed down with a bottle of Eiswein. By the end of it you’re screaming for a tumbler of vinegar cut with lemon juice and a nice sprinkling of asafoetida.

Meryl Streep in Julie and Julia

The strongest food movies deliver their payload of pleasure because they are also larded with disappointment, and basted in grief. Best of all was Big Night, the 1996 New York restaurant drama co-directed by the great Stanley Tucci, who also played one of a pair of ill-matched brothers in whom tears of laughter alternate with those of fraternal rage as they wait in vain for the breakthrough that will put their trattoria on the map. But in Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia, Tucci is wasted as Julia Child’s husband Paul, reduced to a Good Egg in a nice suit. Could it be that the reliably tart Ephron has herself gone soft-boiled? She was after all the writer of Heartburn, her roman à clef in which a cookery writer –also played by Meryl Streep in the film version – is betrayed by a philandering husband. That story ends with a separation. But this movie is so mercilessly adorable, such a hymn to conjugal affinity – complete with intimations of cutesy sex – that it makes Mary Poppins look like Pulp Fiction.

Julia Child was indeed every bit as lovely as Meryl Streep’s dead-on impersonation makes her out to be. It’s one of Streep’s virtuoso turns, nailing Child’s ungainly generosity, her moral innocence, the big-boned energy that cleavered its way to culinary euphoria.

The story is a good one. In the 1960s Mastering the Art of French Cooking was an event in cookbook publishing. It represented the rejection of the reigning kitchen bible for young American wives, Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, which book and author are the butt of a slightly unsisterly snigger in one scene of the movie. There’s a little social loftiness in this eviction of the pot roast in favour of the pâté de canard en croûte, and the vision of postwar Paree as liberator could be described as wide-eyed. It is telling that – unlike the sensually knowledgeable Elizabeth David, hungry for terroir – Child greets the news that she might have to live in Marseilles with horror.

That Mastering has once again shot to bestsellerdom is a tribute to the therapy-fable conveyed by the movie, since the book is actually something of a relic of the era when men wandered into the kitchen to offer encouragement and commendation while the Guests were Gathering. In My Life in France, the memoir she wrote with her nephew, Child is disarmingly humorous about stumbling into cordon bleu school so as to have “something to do” while her husband put on exhibitions that promoted Franco-American understanding. Amy Adams as Julie Powell, on the other hand, a fretful pixie, decides to slog her way through Mastering not because she has nothing but because she has something to do, the something in question being on the other end of the phone advising angry families of the victims of 9/11. What with the low wages and constant stress, not to mention being put down by her yuppie bitches-from-hell lunch-friends, this is such a downer that it drives her to the quest for the perfect boeuf bourguignonne.

Much is said – and true it is – of the healing power of the kitchen against the pangs of weltschmerz. But the underlying message is creepier: that helping out New Yorkers for chump change is so much less nifty than blogging your way to fame and fortune on the back of Julia Child’s book. In a scene near the end of the movie, Julie is thunderstruck to learn, via a reporter, that her cynosure doesn’t think all that much of her or her blog, one of the few touches of discomfort in a movie otherwise steaming in its bain-marie of self-congratulation. Someone pass the Alka Seltzer, would you?

Other releases

Katie Jarvis as Mia in ‘Fish Tank’

After her Oscar-winning short film Wasp and her striking feature debut Red Road, Andrea Arnold remains on impressive form with Fish Tank. This time the setting is a grim housing estate on London’s eastern outskirts. At the centre of the action – or, more precisely, inaction – is Mia (a strong debut from Kate Jarvis), a wilful, aimless teenager energised only by bouts of drinking and the ritualistic dance routines that she performs alone. She shares her depressing flat with her single mother and a younger sister, with both of whom she has seemingly loveless, verbally abusive relationships. The only warm, emotional connection she feels to another living thing is with an ailing horse belonging to local travellers – until Connor, a young Irish man (Michael Fassbender once more co-starring in a fine, notably downbeat British movie), turns up in her life as her mother’s lover.

Is Connor the father figure that Mia seeks? Or something more sinister? Is there any chance for escape? How will Mia’s uneasy relationship with her sister develop? This is a thriller of sorts, the kind of thriller that Ken Loach might make in collaboration with Michael Haneke, a slice of social-realist cinema in which we are never sure what – if anything – is about happen. It’s oppressively pessimistic but also utterly gripping.

Adventureland is a companion piece to director Greg Mottola’s previous film, Superbad, another comedy-drama about young men of college age, on the cusp of adulthood and anxious about their continued virginity. But the twist here – one of several – is that where in Superbad (and The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Porky’s, The Summer of ’42, Animal House and countless others) the leading characters were desperate to lose their cherry, James (Jesse Eisenberg, familiar from The Squid and the Whale) is a romantic waiting to find true love. The setting is Pittsburgh in the mid-1980s and the recently graduated and freshly heartbroken James is forced by circumstances to take a summer job in a run-down amusement park. There he finds friendship, falls in love and experiences more heartache but grows up at least a little. While this has its longueurs and is not without clichés, it is also a richly enjoyable, witty, well observed piece of nostalgia.

While Meryl Streep, her screen alter ego from The Devil Wears Prada, is clearly enjoying herself in Julie & Julia, Anna Wintour is on robust form, if perhaps not quite as waspish as we’d want, in The September Issue. This sleek, very entertaining documentary follows several months in the lives of the Vogue editor and assorted colleagues and associates – Sienna Miller and Mario Testino among them – as they prepare for the September 2007 issue, which, at a chunky 800-plus pages, is the longest in its history. This makes for mildly insightful viewing, and is consistently engaging, while never coming close to convincing the agnostic that the fashion world is other than frivolous. But Wintour and her long-time collaborator Grace Coddington are an amusing double act and while, perhaps conscious of the cameras, Wintour for the most part holds her notorious tongue, she can’t control her eloquently withering glances.

Dorian Gray, Oliver Parker’s third Wilde adaptation, is something of a disappointment. It is a fairly good-looking film, but eccentrically cast – Ben Barnes is insufficiently charismatic in the central role – and the real problem is that while it has some effective moments of horror it is, as a drama, peculiarly inert.

Sorority Row (Dir Stewart Hendler, Cert 18, 2/5) is an old-style stalker-slasher movie of no great distinction. As it must, a prelude sets up the action, which unfolds after a flash-forward of several months and consists of a mysterious assailant exacting bloody and not especially imaginative revenge on a group of egocentric college girls. White Out (Dir Dominic Sena, Cert 15, 2/5), an uninspired thriller, is no smarter than Sorority Row and is in fact notably unfortunate in not even being the week’s best or goriest horror film, in which workers at an Antarctic base are terrorised by a wraith-like and apparently unstoppable assailant. That accolade goes to The Thing (Dir John Carpenter, Cert 15, 4/5), which is looking as good as ever nearly 30 years after its original release. Finally, Miss March: Generation Penetration (Dirs Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, Cert 15, 1/5) is a dire gross-out comedy that tackles many of the same themes as Adventureland but without an ounce of subtlety or wit.