Devil Wears Prada, The

Stars: Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Stanley Tucci, Emily Blunt, Adrian Grenier, Simon Baker

Director: David Frankel

A cunning mixture of winning elements from previous film hits, most notably Working Girl.

Fashion-free Andy (Hathaway), fresh from college and casting aside her law degree for a career in journalism, hardly seems the type to work for New York's hautest couture magazine Runway, where bitchery reigns supreme, let alone its control-freak editor Miranda (Streep).

Andy soon finds out from Miranda's top PA Emily (Emily Blunt) that she needs to be slave, memory expert and miracle worker rolled into one. But Andy is smart and determined not to fail.

And, being the beauty that Hathaway clearly is, she is also a natural glamourpot and clothes horse who learns quickly, looks almost as good in fashions as Audrey Hepburn and eventually (and sometimes improbably) works her way into Miranda's good books - to the extent that the luckless Emily is pushed aside in her favour.

Inevitably all this estranges Andy from her fashionably unshaven boyfriend (Grenier) and all her old buddies.

Miranda's an easy role to play here, but, Streep being Streep, she plays it better than well, mixing her dismissive comments and impossible demands with glimpses of the human being underneath the contemptuous gaze. It's old-fashioned, over-easy entertainment.

David Quinlan

USA 2006. UK Distributor: 20th Century Fox. Technicolor.
109 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: PG.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 0, Violence/Horror 0, Drugs 0, Swearing 1.

Review date: 01 Oct 2006