The Devil Wears Prada

Based on the best-selling book which no one any more pretends to be anything other than a portrait of Vogue's Anna Wintour, the movie version tries to have its cake and eat it too by showing the glamorous, glitzy world of fashion but also pointing out earnestly that it's all terribly shallow. Not that any of its characters would ever dream of eating a cake.

Anne Hathaway plays earnest graduate and aspiring writer Andrea, who in desperation to get a job, ends up applying to be second assistant to a fashion magazine editor - slumming it, she thinks. What the boho chick in the cute but dorky jumper doesn't know is that Miranda Priestly's Runway is not just a magazine, it is a whole world, where her values mean nothing and the icy power of Miranda rules supreme. Her staff treats her like a Roman emperor, whose merest pucker of the lips can kill a feature they've worked on for months, or declare that some outre accessory is the new must-have.

Everyone is terrified of Miranda, except the clueless Andy, although after being hired for just that reason, she quickly succumbs to her boss' imperious will. And no wonder: Meryl Streep plays Miranda like a cross between Cruella de Vil and Margaret Thatcher, brought to life in a succession of frighteningly well-made outfits.

Her increasingly difficult demands - everything from constantly hanging up her many coats and fetching coffees to tracking down the unpublished manuscript of the next Harry Potter book - give Streep a chance to indulge her evil side, but with great subtlety. She rarely raises her voice - she doesn't have to. The scenes without Miranda feel smaller.

That's no reflection on Hathaway, who is perfectly charming as well as being so very beautiful that just looking at her lovely face is as nice as gazing at a fluffy kitten. Stanley Tucci provides reliable back-up as a middle-aged variant on the traditional gay best friend character, while rising British starlet Emily Blunt is impressively bitchy as Miranda's No.1 assistant, who is not pleased when Andy, after fumbling around, gets her act together and decides to try to do the job as best she can.

With a wardrobe upgrade, an on-off flirtation with a sleazy journalist (sleazier than usual, that is, irritatingly played by Simon Baker) and a very, very gradual sell-off of her soul, Andy starts devoting her every waking hour (and some of the others, too) to being the perfect fashionista. Her original dreams of being a campaigning reporter fade away with her old clothes and old certainties.

Though Andy's relationship with her boyfriend comes under stress, what's refreshing about this chick flick - especially for young women - is its change of emphasis from the usual falling in love to trying to find a way to do what she does best, about moral choices in the workplace and maintaining one's own identity.

But it's the glacial Miranda who fascinates, just as she does everyone in her orbit, and while a scene finally revealing the price she's paid for her success may be hopelessly cliched - she can't keep a man! she has no real friends! she's getting older and work is her whole life! - Streep's pitch-perfect performance is tremendously watchable. Wish there had been more of it.