Eat Pray Love Reviews
Top CriticThe film version is pure wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The movie is aware of its own riches; it fills up your plate and dares you not to eat.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
We're not so much involved in the movie as idly registering it -- eavesdropping, almost, on a conversation at an adjoining table.
The movie is completely aware of its own riches; it fills up your plate and dares you not to eat.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Try not to hoot when the gaunt Roberts makes a bring-on-the-flab speech to persuade the equally slender Tuva Novotny to eat pizza, even if they get "muffin tops."
The movie left me with the feeling of being trapped with a person of privilege who won't stop with the whine whine whine.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Eat Pray Love is like an overstuffed lightweight suitcase, with little room for us to feel the emotional connections Liz makes with new friends along the way.
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| Original Score: 2/4
It may come as a bit of a shock to some that the most interesting turns in the woman-on-a-quest sojourn don't belong to Roberts, luminous though she is. Those are owned by a number of misty-eyed if masculine menfolk.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
For two decades, Julia Roberts has been a bona fide movie star, and she shines in his gorgeous if overlong travelogue.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
It's a thin line between "self-aware" and "self-involved" and it's one the movie treads uncertainly.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The film's most crucial constituency -- the book's rabid fans -- are likely to feel well served by Murphy's adaptation, which hews pretty faithfully to Gilbert's story.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Even if you buy Roberts as an introspective writer (I didn't), there's no real sense of an emotional journey here.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
It's about something important, the search for meaning and happiness, about finding one's inner life amid the clutter and confusion of modern existence.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Eat Pray Love is mostly a slog; never giving us a compelling reason why its heroine does what she does, or how she became quite so tiresomely self- absorbed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
A minor and superficial summer diversion that offers female viewers not much more than a two-hour escape fantasy.
Glibly portrays selfishness as a life choice, ranking gluttony on a par with finding God and a life partner.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
It helps that Roberts rides all the turbulent waves with such ease and such grace, that Jenkins knows exactly what to do with his internal churn, and that Bardem can do no wrong.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The book's internal dialogue, that of a good observer with a lively mind, has turned into the extravagantly external and cloyingly earnest quest of a woman in deep distress.
Lives are messy. A little mess in the movie wouldn't have hurt at all.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Roberts is the obvious focus here, but she's enough of a pro to get out of the way and let a scene be stolen.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Its span may be global, but its scope is modest, and it accepts a certain superficiality as the price of useful insight.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
The film version's biggest challenge? The road to self-discovery is littered with clichés.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Only hard-core fans of Oprah's BFF will be able to stomach this navel-gazing tripe, which posits "me-first" consumerism as the road to happiness.
Watching the relationship between Liz and Felipe evolve from a comforting friendship to a love that's both companionable and sexy is gratifying.
A well-meant, if not exactly transcendent, adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's beloved, Oprah-endorsed memoir.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
An overlong bore that either mistakenly thinks it's something more than a humdrum romance or has incorporated a variety of pretentions as window-dressing.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Mostly it's the pleasant company of Julia Roberts that makes Eat Pray Love a benign, sometimes soporific slide into femme fantasy -- a less vulgar shopping trip than Sex and the City 2.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
At the moment, the only person eating more delectably in Italy is Tilda Swinton in I Am Love.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Though there are a handful of funny lines, the deeper observations are facile. The whole journey feels like a rich girl gone slumming.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The film is a fairly faithful transcription of events, even though Liz, as played by Roberts, carries a faint air of entitlement. I'm not sure this could be avoided on screen.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
You can see how it would be fun to spend a year traveling with Gilbert. A lot more fun than spending nearly 2.5 hours watching a movie about it.
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| Original Score: 2/4
If only Roberts' warmth, coupled with Javier Bardem's scruffy sexiness as Felipe, were enough to compensate for the folded-map flatness of this production.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
It provides a gorgeous escape, exquisitely photographed and full of female wish fulfillment. Yet it also offers sufficient emotional heft and self-discovery to make you feel as if you've actually learned something.
Unlike the book, there's no big emotional breakdown; instead, this is a postcard-pretty case of midlife soul-searching.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
A heavily idealized journey of self-discovery with a pretty woman (Julia Roberts), pretty scenery and a pretty shallow view of Eastern spirituality.
The food looks great, but the romance is undercooked, and God remains strictly a bit player.
Eat Pray Love isn't a bad movie -- just a spiritually dead one, wearing and wearying.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
