"Julie & Julia" **1/2 (out of four): Meryl Streep turns in a brilliant performance as the late Julia Child. Too bad she couldn't have the whole movie to herself.

Julia Child was, in every sense, a towering figure in the culinary world. Big of body and of personality, she made French cuisine accessible and appealing to American home cooks. Both canonized and lampooned, her show "The French Chef" was groundbreaking ― spawning generations of celebrity chefs, foodies and devoted fans. One of those fans, Julie Powell, was so enamored of Child and her recipes that she wrote a blog about it. That blog eventually became a book, which has now become a movie, written and directed by Nora Ephron.

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