Julie & Julia

Julie & Julia follows two women whose lives are joined by a cookbook. In 1948 Paris, Julia Child, the wife of an American cultural attaché, takes up French cooking and begins the work that leads to her landmark recipe collection. Decades later in New York, Julie Powell, approaching thirty and stuck in a dull secretarial job, sets herself the task of cooking all 524 recipes from that book within a single year. She records her successes and failures in a blog that gradually attracts a following, while her project becomes a way of giving her life direction.

Nora Ephron directed and wrote the screenplay, working from the two memoirs. The film is the seventh she directed, following Sleepless in Seattle, Mixed Nuts, Michael, You've Got Mail, Lucky Numbers and Bewitched. Meryl Streep plays Julia Child, with Amy Adams as Julie Powell, Stanley Tucci as Paul Child, and Chris Messina as Eric Powell. Linda Emond and Helen Carey appear as Julia's French cooking collaborators. The production had a budget of 40 million dollars and took about 130 million worldwide.

On IMDb the film holds 7 out of 10 from roughly 136,000 votes, while on TMDB it rates 6.7 from about 2,258 votes. A critics' rating of 6.9 from 220 reviews places it close to the audience scores. The modest budgets and steady returns, along with the similar ratings, indicate a broadly liked film with a wide, general audience.