Metacritic reviews

Eat Pray Love is like one of those rich dishes Liz consumes in Italy; robustly flavored and guiltily pleasurable.

Eat Pray Love isn't a bad movie -- just a spiritually dead one, wearing and wearying.

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.

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.

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.

The film never ventures, even once, into a situation that does not reek of comfy familiarity.

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.

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.

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?

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.