Miranda Priestly never raises her voice, and that is what makes her frightening. At Andy Sachs’s interview she asks, in a light voice that tilts upward at the end, whether Andy wants a job at Runway despite having no personal sense of fashion or style. Andy starts to answer, “Well, I think that’s a matter of –”, and Miranda cuts her off: “It is not a question.” The Guardian singles out this exchange, and rightly. Five words end the conversation, and they cost nothing to say. David Frankel’s 2006 adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s novel spends the rest of its running time chasing that economy. It does not always catch it.

Andy, played by Anne Hathaway, comes from Ohio, one of what the fashion world calls the “flyover states”. The Guardian describes her as a young woman with good grades and bad clothes who applies for the job as a stopgap before becoming a real writer. Miranda hires her anyway, on what the Guardian calls some unfathomably cruel caprice. The premise is simple, and Moviemetropolis is right to praise Frankel for keeping it that way: nothing stands between the audience and the characters. The BBC says Hathaway provides the film’s soft centre, a wannabe journalist trying to reconcile her ambition with a deeper core of human decency. Moviemetropolis singles out her awkward charm, her warmth and her understated determination. The part asks her to be clumsy and likeable at the same time, over a long stretch, and she never becomes tiresome at either.

Streep carries the film, and the BBC’s description of her is the most exact I have read: Miranda is so imposing she does not need to shout, and her indictments of Andy’s weight and dress sense are “softly spoken, languid and bitterly funny.” A colleague warns the new assistant that “pressed lips” denote “catastrophe”, and from then on a tightened mouth is enough to make the room go quiet. The Guardian notes that Miranda is plainly modelled on Anna Wintour of American Vogue, although she wears her dark glasses outdoors only. It also describes the office as an emotional S&M arrangement in which she bullies and humiliates the staff and they worship her in return. Moviemetropolis calls the performance one of remarkable precision, every line laced with icy authority. Yet the BBC finds more in Streep than a simmering cauldron of evil: a trace of tragedy that earns Miranda a flicker of sympathy even as she turns her nose up at the less fabulous. The sympathy is brief and the film never lingers on it, but it is why her cruelty feels like a character’s and not a mechanism.

When Streep is off screen, the film sags. The Guardian is blunt about it: the interest factor plummets. I agree, although the supporting cast is not so much the problem as the writing they are handed. Stanley Tucci plays Nigel, the art director who helps Andy dress for the magazine. The Guardian files him under the obligatory Bald Gay Male Confidant, a type Willie Garson played in Sex and the City, and concedes that he does his best. Moviemetropolis, more generous, praises the warmth and subtlety he brings despite limited screen time. Both are right. Tucci lifts every scene he is given, and the film gives him too few.

Emily Blunt splits the critics. As Emily, the senior assistant who clashes with Andy, she draws the Guardian’s harshest note: she is the one actor who really looks as if she could work in fashion, yet it finds her strained and awkward, without the hauteur she showed in My Summer of Love. Moviemetropolis sees the opposite, a fiercely driven assistant played with a balance that makes you admire and resent her in equal measure. The gap between those two verdicts is wide. A character built to be admired and resented at once is a hard thing to land, and Emily’s function in the story is plain: she is the rival Andy has to get past. I lean toward the Guardian here, because the film seems more interested in what Emily does to Andy than in who she is.

The larger problem is tone. The Guardian coins the cruellest phrase for it, saying the film wants to have its non-fat, vegan cake and eat it. It borrows the speed and glamour of the wicked fashion business, then grows up at the last minute and decides all of it was superficial. Andy ends up scared by how badly she is behaving, though, as the Guardian points out, she never does anything truly bad. Even the episode that damages her standing at Runway, her failure to get Miranda back from Miami because of a hurricane, as the reviewer Ashley Hajimirsadeghi recalls it, reads as a stain on her record rather than a real moral test. The satire bites in the first act and then loses its nerve. The Guardian’s coinage “flattire”, a satire that celebrates and defers to what it is supposed to be sending up, is harsh, but it describes exactly what the second half does: it bows to the world it set out to mock.

The BBC puts its finger on the other weakness: a dull romance plot. Simon Baker and Adrian Grenier, as Christian and Nate, are stuck in a subplot the film does not need, because its best relationship is the one between Andy and Miranda. The BBC credits Frankel for avoiding any mushiness in that sadomasochistic mentor-protégé bond, and for letting mutual respect develop convincingly, even movingly, inside it. Then comes the ending, where, in the BBC’s words, he ties pretty bows around the story and leaves it with less bite than it could have had. Rotten Tomatoes puts the same reservation more mildly: the film remains highly entertaining even if its screenplay structure becomes increasingly obvious once you have seen enough films.

On craft, Moviemetropolis has nothing but praise. The soundtrack is exceptional and runs from the opening moments to the closing credits, and the camera work is of a high standard. That review also reminds us that Frankel was then best known for television, and that he turned a book it calls lacklustre into a first-rate film. The BBC, for its part, calls the same novel scathing. The two judgments disagree about the book, but they agree about the result: the film is gentler than its source and funnier than its plot.

The film has had a long afterlife. A stage musical was first staged in 2022, Weisberger followed her novel with a sequel, Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns, in 2013, and a film sequel arrived in 2026. Moviemetropolis, writing after catching the original again on ITV2, says it still holds up remarkably well.

The Devil Wears Prada is entertaining, sharply acted at the top and thin below, and Streep is what holds it up. Her Miranda needs only a murmur and a pair of pressed lips, and in every scene she owns, the flat romance and the over-tidy ending matter far less than they should.