Film reviews: The Devil Wears Prada 2 is familiar, yet fabulously fun
The Devil Wears Prada 2
★★★★☆
You know fast fashion is becoming a problem when it promises to unseat Her Satanic Majesty from her throne as the Queen of High Couture. (PG) opens with Runway magazine rocked by a ‘speed fash’ scandal that threatens to undermine Miranda Priestly’s (Meryl Streep) life-long dedication to championing beauty and quality.
Already hanging on by its exquisitely buffed French tips — ‘Remember when magazines were a thing?’ enquires the impish art director Nigel (Stanley Tucci) — Runway is in dire need of a figurehead of impeccable integrity: Step forward Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), formerly Miranda’s long-suffering assistant and now an award-winning writer who has just lost her job as a serious newspaper journalist. Can Andy save ‘the 100-year-old institution’ that is Runway while secretly writing a warts-and-all hatchet job on the woman who made her life hell all those years ago?
As well as reassembling the original cast (Emily Blunt also returns, this time running point on the Manhattan outpost of Dior’s global empire), the makers reunite writers Aline Brosh McKenna and Lauren Weisberger with director David Frankel, none of whom — wisely — are interested in reinventing the formula that worked so well 20 years ago.
And so we get the wide-eyed Hathaway rushing about seeking validation and fashion tips, Streep floating through scenes like a cloud of poison gas, Blunt in deliciously cynical form, and Tucci playing the avuncular repository of tough love and tender asides.
There are a number of references to the decades-long hollowing out of print media to keep things contemporary, but really this is all about the spectacle: the eye-popping frocks, Streep rattling off politically incorrect barbs, and a Milan fashion spectacular crowned by Lady Gaga in imperious form. It might all feel a little familiar to fans of the original, but it’s fabulous fun.
★★★★☆
(15A) stars Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, a world-weary American author who arrives at a small hotel in West Cork to scoff at the locals’ tales of witches and haunted rooms.
But when receptionist Fiona (Florence Ordesh) goes missing in strange circumstances, Bauman starts to wonder if some of the locals — chief among them the intimidating hotel manager Mal (Peter Coonan) and Jerry (David Wilmot), a shaggy-haired wild man who lives in the woods and sustains himself on psilocybin-infused goat milk — might have more to do with Fiona’s disappearance than any supernatural entity. Written and directed by Damian McCarthy (Oddity, 2024, Caveat, 2020), has the fractured, surreal quality of a nightmare as Bauman tries to penetrate a web of folklore to get to the truth of human evil.
The latter stages are less convincing than the plot twists of the first hour deserve, but confirms that Damian McCarthy is a director with an impressively subversive take on the conventions of psychological horror.
★★★★☆
Set in a small Limerick town in the early 1980s, (15A) unfolds over the course of a single night, with cinema owner Earl Clancy (Colin Morgan) overseeing an evening screening of Breathless (the 1983 Richard Gere version) while mulling over a buy-out offer made by local politician Harry Conway (Stanley Townsend).
Written and directed by David Gleeson, this is a love letter to small cinemas: Earl is battling against falling revenues, the rise of home video, and his younger brother Gerald’s (Calam Lynch) demands that he liquidate the family asset, all the while dealing with rowdy customers, drunk projectionists, a rodent infestation, and power outages. Tender in tone (there’s an early nod to Cinema Paradiso to set the mood) and blackly comic, and featuring a terrific performance from Colin Morgan as Earl, this is one for cinephiles everywhere.
- All theatrical releases
