Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron, 123 mins, (12A)<br/>The September Issue, RJ Cutler, 90 mins, (12A)

Ephron is back on the boil in this witty hymn to Fifties food and modern marriage

Heart-and-soul devotion to the work of a single celebrity chef, not just to their recipes but the example of their personality, could be a dangerous business. Would slavishly following Gordon Ramsay, day after day, mean a disintegration of language into the gutter, and the transformation of one's home into a cut-throat Coliseum? Would discipleship of Nigella Lawson lead to compulsive flirtatiousness and night-time raids on the fridge.

While this may seem a whimsical enquiry, the rather moreish comedy Julie & Julia relates one such real-life exercise. New Yorker Julie Powell's favourite chef was Julia Child, the doyenne of American food writing, whose 1961 book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, helped to transform American home-dining. In 2002 Powell, an under-achieving writer at the end of her tether, set out to cook her way through Child's masterpiece, tackling 524 recipes in 365 days and charting her experience on a blog, which changed her life.

Nora Ephron's film flits between 1950s Paris – where Child (Meryl Streep) accompanies her diplomat husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) and falls in love with the local cuisine which she sets out to master, much to the comic chagrin of the predominantly male chefs – and New York's Queens, 50 years later, as Julie (Amy Adams) threatens to buckle under the strain of the lobster-drowning, duck-boning and aspic-setting that confront her.

Based on two memoirs, Powell's Julie & Julia and Child's My Life in France, this is as much a paean to successful marriage as it is to food, for behind each woman's success is the support – and enthusiastic eating – of a loving husband. The result is Ephron's best work since her script for When Harry Met Sally 20 years ago, a comedy imbued with genuine wit and warmth.

The younger actors are good, but the older divine. Lest anyone think Streep's pantomime voice an over-the-top affectation, Ephron shows us a real clip of Dan Aykroyd's murderously funny Saturday Night Live send-up of Child in her TV chef mode, suggesting that Streep is right on the money. At the same time, the actress reveals the depth of spirit and resolve beneath her character's indefatigable bonhomie. Tucci is a perfect foil, as subtle as Streep is broad, and a gimlet-eyed scene-stealer.

Those two last co-starred together in The Devil Wears Prada, in which the actress played a fearsome fashion magazine editor said to be based on Vogue's Anna Wintour. The real thing can be glimpsed, if not exactly revealed, in The September Issue, a terrific documentary that goes behind the scenes at the New York offices of the fashion bible.

Adopting a fly-on-the-wall approach during the making of the magazine's most important issue, director R J Cutler shows a world that is by turns absurdly self-important, jaw-droppingly bitchy and even, occasionally, inspirational.

Said inspiration is not courtesy of the film's nominal subject, the famously frightening Wintour, but from a source less familiar to those of us who are not fashion cognoscenti. And in this, one has a sense that Cutler, like any good documentary maker, has had the good sense to allow a different film to emerge than the one he had planned. For while trying, and mostly failing, to find the human being behind the wintry Wintour façade, he has unearthed the real soul of the magazine – and a lovely, down-to-earth human being to boot – in creative director Grace Coddington.

If the magazine's gruelling schedule provides the film's momentum, Coddington's part in the process offers the dramatic through-line, as we watch her create and fret her way through a series of photo-shoots, carefully assembling her gorgeous tableaux, while terrified that each will be disassembled by Wintour and her lapdogs. Any artist with an editor or client to contend with will recognise her agonies. Coddington's sometimes shrewd, sometimes half-crazed comments about her boss are very good value. What's more, Cutler recognises her and Wintour's long-standing, love-hate relationship as the key to the magazine, a ying and yang of creativity and control that has thousands of fashion followers in thrall.

Also showing: 13/09/2009

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