Eat Pray Love
Columbia Pictures | Release Date: August 13, 2010 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
50
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 39 Critic Reviews
Positive:
13
Mixed:
22
Negative:
4
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
80
Time OutJoshua Rothkopf
All of the performances are knockouts, especially The Visitor's Richard Jenkins as a damaged Texas spiritualist who steeps the movie in intimacy. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeWesley Morris
Is it a romantic comedy? Is it a chick flick? This is silly, since, in truth, it's neither. It's simply a Julia Roberts movie, often a lovely one. Read full review
75
Tampa Bay TimesSteve Persall
Eat Pray Love is like one of those rich dishes Liz consumes in Italy; robustly flavored and guiltily pleasurable. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
It is 140 minutes long and repetitious beyond belief. Yet for all its weaknesses - unconscious contradictions, travelogue simplicity and mix-and-match spirituality - Eat Pray Love is, like its central character, on a genuine quest. Read full review
75
MovielineStephanie Zacharek
Eat Pray Love works quite serviceably as a light comedy and a pleasing travelogue. Read full review
75
Miami HeraldConnie Ogle
The film is far from perfect, but it's likely to inspire more than few quests for balance -- or at least a fabulous bowl of linguine. Read full review
70
Los Angeles TimesBetsy Sharkey
If there is one constant in Eat Pray Love, the imperfect yet beautifully rendered adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir on a year of heartbreak and healing starring Julia Roberts - it is this: There will be tears. Read full review
70
The New York TimesA.O. Scott
The film offers an easygoing and generous blend of wish fulfillment, vicarious luxury, wry humor and spiritual uplift, with a star, Julia Roberts, who elicits both envy and empathy. Read full review
63
Philadelphia InquirerSteven Rea
It lacks the resonances of Gilbert's book. Read full review
63
Washington PostAnn Hornaday
Eat Pray Love finally settles into its own cinematic destiny as an attractive escapist love story, in which the romance is more with the I than with the guy. Read full review
63
St. Louis Post-Dispatchgail Pennington
The word that sums up the essence of this movie is "frustrating." Read full review
63
Orlando SentinelRoger Moore
Eat Pray Love isn't a bad movie -- just a spiritually dead one, wearing and wearying. Read full review
63
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike Scott
I've got a fourth verb to add to the comma-challenged title of Julia Roberts' how-to-be-happy travelogue, Eat Pray Love. How about "edit"? Read full review
60
Boxoffice MagazineSara Maria Vizcarrondo
The film knows the aesthetic of enlightenment, the filmmakers demonstrate adoration for their subject, but whether or not the film grasps the principle further is very arguable. Read full review
60
TimeMary Pols
Now that Eat, Pray, Love had lost its commas and become a movie actually starring Julia Roberts, I was no longer annoyed by how much it seemed like one; it had assumed its rightful place in the entertainment universe. Read full review
60
EmpireTony Horkins
A beautiful, languid travelogue, although with some of the source novel's empowerment diluted. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
Director Ryan Murphy achieved a major casting coup in landing Julia Roberts to play Gilbert - or Liz, as she's called here. As it turns out, though, a lesser star may have been a better choice. Read full review
58
The A.V. ClubTasha Robinson
Trouble is, most of the major changes took place inside her head and heart, which makes her story a natural fit for a book, but an awkward one for a film. Read full review
58
Entertainment WeeklyLisa Schwarzbaum
If only Roberts' warmth, coupled with Javier Bardem's scruffy sexiness as Felipe, were enough to compensate for the folded-map flatness of this production. Read full review
50
USA TodayClaudia Puig
The whole journey feels like a rich girl gone slumming. And for those of us along for the ride, it's a bit of a slog. Read full review
50
NPRScott Tobias
Though Eat Pray Love never loses the sour whiff of unexamined first-world privilege, its heroine does at least immerse herself in different cultures rather than expecting them to adapt to her. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Jennie Punter
Running more than two hours – a very long time for an adaptation of a book without a plot – Eat Pray Love is like an overstuffed lightweight suitcase, with little room for us to feel the emotional connections Liz makes with new friends along the way. Read full review
50
Arizona RepublicRandy Cordova
The general dippiness isn't helped by the dialogue: "Every word in Italian is like a truffle!" Gilbert exclaims as she learns the language. Equally annoying is the gauzy lighting, which gives Roberts a sweetly angelic glow most of the time. Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterKirk Honeycutt
The film never ventures, even once, into a situation that does not reek of comfy familiarity. Read full review
50
VarietyJustin Chang
Director Ryan Murphy's superficial take on Elizabeth Gilbert's phenomenally successful memoir is an exotic junk-food buffet that offers few lasting pleasures or surprises, let alone epiphanies. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleKimberley Jones
Roberts, wearing that beatific half-smile of hers that suggests inner peace and wisdom before she's even begun her journey, is too open-faced with her emotions to signal the complexities of Gilbert's distress – over her divorce, her control issues, her rootlessness, and inability to live in the moment. Read full review
50
Christian Science MonitorAndy Klein
What with the title and pedigree, no one would expect Eat Pray Love to be filled with thrilling action. But the word "movie" does imply movement, and almost nothing ever happens throughout the protracted two hours and 20 minutes. Read full review
50
L.A. WeeklyKarina Longworth
Though targeted to the same female filmgoers who flocked to the self-realization via food porn of "Julie & Julia," EPL is a comparative downer, letting viewers experience the rush of self-improvement without having to do any of the work. I cried. Mission accomplished? Read full review
50
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
Shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue, and it mercifully reverses the life chronology of many people, which is Love Pray Eat. Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
The very elements of Eat Pray Love that helped make it a success in 40 languages -- the breezy prose, the relentless sorting-through of dissatisfactions, a steady stream of intriguing sights -- turn the film into a travelogue with a little spiritual questing on the side. Read full review
42
Portland OregonianM. E. Russell
Eat Pray Love is magazine-spread self-help bullcorn with the highest possible production values, and I wasn't having any of it. Read full review
40
SlateDana Stevens
In short, Elizabeth Gilbert is the Julia Roberts of writers, which means that the film adaptation by Ryan Murphy (the creator of Nip/Tuck and Glee) got at least one thing right. Read full review
40
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
In the golden turd that is Eat Pray Love, everyone helps Julia Roberts find herself so she can then experience true love. Read full review
40
SalonAndrew O'Hehir
A minor and superficial summer diversion that offers female viewers not much more than a two-hour escape fantasy, but that's not a crime. Read full review
40
Chicago ReaderAndrea Gronvall
How can a romantic drama tailor-made for Julia Roberts from Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir about self-actualization--shot against alluring locales in Italy, India, and Bali, and directed by the acclaimed Ryan Murphy (TV's Nip/Tuck and Glee)--go so ass-numbingly wrong? Read full review
38
New York PostLou Lumenick
A very shallow, very glossy 2½-hour travelogue starring a miscast Julia Roberts as a spoiled, self-centered divorcée who decides to get away from it all. Read full review
38
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
A muddle of a film - an overlong bore that either mistakenly thinks it's something more than a humdrum romance or has incorporated a variety of pretentions as window-dressing. Read full review
30
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
Still, Eat Pray Love preaches a sermon it doesn't practice-the need to open one's self to the world. In a pictorial sense this is exactly what Liz does; she vacuums up the transformative essence of three continents. Yet the world gets weirdly short shrift because this transcendently narcissistic movie is, in a narrative sense, almost entirely about Liz and the movie star who plays her. Read full review
25
Rolling StonePeter Travers
The movie left me with the feeling of being trapped with a person of privilege who won't stop with the whine whine whine. Read full review
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