THE INDEPENDENT
FOUR STARS
The main quartet were so well-suited to their original roles that all Streep needs to do is play thoughtfully with a beaded necklace and, instantly, it’s like Miranda never left us. Andy is no longer the naïf, but we’ve enjoyed two decades of increasingly confident, impassioned characters from Hathaway, so the maturation is basically a given. Blunt happily walks away with some of the best line deliveries
EMPIRE
THREE STARS
Hathaway maintains plucky affability despite her character becoming more world-weary, while Blunt’s comedic timing and flashes of vulnerability save the film from feeling too serious… At its epicentre, Streep lets us a little deeper into Miranda’s psyche without losing that magnetic elusiveness. Her power survives intact, even if she’s not given a worthy adversary to unleash it upon.
THE GUARDIAN
THREE STARS
This follow-up is fun, though let down by Andy’s bafflingly dreary and chemistry-free romance with a dull Australian real estate magnate (a tepid role for Patrick Brammall from TV’s Colin from Accounts)… This is good-natured, buoyant entertainment. It’s wearing well.
THE TELEGRAPH
FOUR STARS
An avalanche of fashion-world cameos and a crack returning cast turn this sequel into a millennial nostalgia bath – who’s complaining? Like Tom Cruise grinning away in the cockpit in Top Gun: Maverick, Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly is back, exactly as you remember.
The film is a glorious, glamorous tribute to the noughties with acid wit and unabashed love of luxury and glamour, making a product of an earlier age’
THE TIMES
FOUR STARS
It’s a savvy circular touch that brings Weisberger’s book back into play and provides the drama with that most elusive of modern film accessories: satisfying closure… Hathaway once again injects Andy with just the right hint of perky naivety to maintain her status as the clueless straight woman to her co-star’s scheming diva.
THE DAILY MAIL: BRIAN VINER
FOUR STARS
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is smart and funny, and there are plenty of satisfying one-liners indicating how the world has changed in 20 years. I laughed aloud at one of them, when a disaffected books editor complains about her latest project ‘editing a memoir by one of Paris Hilton ‘s chihuahuas.
THE DAILY MAIL: ALEANDRA SHULMAN
FOUR STARS
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is endlessly self-referential, harking back to some of the best jokes in the original, while also uncannily predicting situations the new order throws up. It’s high-voltage, sparkling fun. And some fun is surely what we all need right now.
VARIETY
The good news is that ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ is not willfully enshittified. It’s a sequel made with intelligence and respect for both its predecessor and the legions who still love it, so much so that it functions less as a follow-up than as a kind of tribute act, albeit one featuring all the original talent — picking out the comic and dramatic highs from the first film and faithfully replaying them with the same moves and cadences. But it is, by almost any metric, a lesser movie: narratively, emotionally and cinematically flatter, buoyed by game performances that nonetheless steadfastly fail to surprise.
FINANCIAL TIMES
Some things don’t change, though. In the new film, one Runway editor asks of a corporate type intent on cost-cutting: ‘Does he even like fashion, he wears Drakkar Noir,’ dismissing him as ‘dressing head to toe in performance synthetics’. Magazines may have passed their heyday, but the spicy put-downs endure.
