GireWire

Meryl Streep dons the voice and apron of the legendary cook Julia Child in the sort-of-fact-based comedy “Julie & Julia.”

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If you’ve seen Meryl Streep’s joyously ebullient take on Julia Child in trailers for “Julie & Julia,” then you already know:

Streep is a hoot-and-a-half as the bigger-than-life American personality who conquered the culinary world with her zest for food and her groundbreaking 1961 recipe book “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”

With her slightly befuddled delivery and her sing-songy voice merrily tripping up and down the scale, Julia Child seemed more like a caricature of a TV chef than a real chef cooking up something tasty before the camera.

Streep wisely avoids creating a carbon-copy of Child, but opts for a fluid, organic performance that enjoins the woman’s spirit more than her speech and mannerisms, and those are already enjoined to the hilt.

Child is only half of the story in Nora Ephron’s movie, culled from Julie Powell’s book-inspiring blog “The Julie/Julia Project” and from Child’s posthumously completed 2006 autobiography “My Life in France.”

The other half, obviously, belongs to Julie, a New Yorker who decides to write her own blog, based on boiling, basting, grilling and processing her way through every one of Child’s French recipes in one year: 524 recipes in 365 days. (Read more…)

Max Mayer’s “Adam” strikes a pleasant balance of seriousness, humor and affection in its depiction of a romance between a gentle man (Hugh Dancy) with Asperger Syndrome and his attractive new neighbor (Rose Byrne). PG-13 (language, sexual situations). 99 minutes. (Read more…)

Now playing at the Century Centre in Chicago and CineArts 6 in Evanston.

Nicholas Jasenovec’s quasi-doc “Paper Heart” is hands-down the most audaciously inventive movie I’ve seen so far this year. The ever-cute Charlyne Yi claims she doesn’t believe in love, so she and a camera crew tour America interviewing regular folks about real romance, with paper puppet sequences adding surrealistic fun. PG-13 (language). 89 minutes. (Read more…)

Now playing at the Century Centre in Chicago.

Goetz Spielmann’s bold fifth feature is an exquisitely wrought, unpredictable tale of fate, lust, love, and bad aim. When a Vienna cop (Andreas Lust) accidentally kills a woman fleeing from a robbery, her ex-con lover (Johannes Krisch) contemplates revenge while cutting up a zillion cords of firewood at his grandfather’s farm. In German and Ukrainian with subtitles. Not rated (contains nudity, sexual situations, violence and coarse language). 121 minutes. (Read more…)

Now playing at the Music Box in Chicago.

Comedian George Simmons (Adam Sandler), left, and comic Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) watch Clarke (Eric Bana) go sports nutty in Judd Apatow’s third comedy feature “Funny People.”

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“Funny People” is a frequently hilarious and more frequently poignant story of three people foolish enough to need a second chance in life, and smart enough to seize it when it comes around.

This marks the third movie directed by the talented Judd Apatow, and it bears the signature elements of his earlier works “The 40 Year Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up” – gross humor, funny and foul language, empathy for its flawed characters, and a refusal to employ a traditional Hollywood villain.

But there’s something else in “Funny People.” It’s a more sophisticated, mature, assured and reflective work that suggests Apatow is evolving as a storyteller.

This is a long movie, 146 minutes, and it’s not as crisp and peppy as it could be.

Nonetheless, it provides plenty of raucous, off-color jokes and character-driven humor, and it gives Adam Sandler a dare-to-be-great role that boldly satirizes his own career as a stand-up-comic-turned-movie-star. (Read more…)

Aviva Kempner’s documentary “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” is a journalistically sound, but conventional, book-reporty look at the amazing accomplishments of Gertrude Berg, whose long-running radio and TV show “The Goldbergs” invented the modern-day sitcom and gave Berg (writer, producer and star) the very first Emmy for best actress. Not rated. 92 minutes. (Read more…)

Now playing at the River East 21 in Chicago and Renaissance Place in Highland Park.

Dramas about psychiatrists tend to bore and annoy me, and Jonas Pate’s “Shrink” reminds me why. Kevin Spacey expends a lot of charisma as Dr. Carter, a burnout shrink who chain-smokes weed and drinks his way through a parade of Hollywood types (Robin Williams, Robert Loggia, Saffron Burrows and others), unsympathetic characters. Rated R for drug use, language, sexual references. 104 minutes. (Read more…)

Now playing at the Century Centre in Chicago.

The Music Box Theater and the Film Noir Foundation proudly present a week-long festival of film noirs. Musician and actor Harry Belafonte comes to Chicago for a Q & A after the screening of his 1959 film noir classic “Odds Against Tomorrow” on Saturday (August 1, 2009). It’s part of a weeklong festival of the best film noir, including “Double Indemnity,” “Framed,” “The Lady from Shanghai,” and the Chicago-set “Call Northside 777.” For details see musicboxtheatre.com

Hurley (voiced by Jon Favreau) is the guinea pig who takes the cake in the animated adventure “G-force.”

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The hits just keep getting dumber.

Walt Disney’s partially computer-animated “G-Force,” created by action-film mogul Jerry Bruckheimer’s production company, barely qualifies as a dumbed-down Saturday morning cartoon show on cinematic, 3-D steroids.

No thought of any character goes unvoiced.

No action occurs without a character explaining it.

Every idea gets cut up into little passive chunks and served to children – presumably the target audience for this noisy collection of surprisingly dingy, 3-D action sequences – so they’re spoon-fed every detail and never required to use their brains.

The plot is literally a plot to take over the world. (Read more…)

Director-editor-producer Jeffrey Levy-Hinte took 30-year-old rolls of 16 mm film out of mothballs and created a toe-tapping piece of music history in this revealing documentary about the three-day concert preceding the 1974 fight between George Foreman and Muhammed Ali. (PG-13) 93 minutes. (Read more…)

Now playing at Pipers Alley in Chicago and Renaissance Place in Highland Park.