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$9.99: Looking for love in a stop-action movie

*** Julie & Julia
Written and directed by Nora Ephron, based on Julie & Julia by Julie Powell and My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme. With Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci and Chris Messina. (PG-13)

Two American women separated by half a century find a purpose in French cooking in Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron's remarkably restrained film of Julie Powell's book about her "year of cooking dangerously," into which Julia Child's memoir My Life in France has been generously interpolated. An employee at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation in the years following 9–11, Powell found respite from callers' health complaints in evenings spent cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days and blogging about it. Thanks to an article about her project in the New York Times, before the year was over she had a publisher and a movie deal.

In Julie Powell, Ephron has her typical heroine, the sort that flinches at boiling lobsters and drops a raspberry Bavarian all over the sidewalk, and in Amy Adams a less cutesy Meg Ryan. But in Julia Child, and in Meryl Streep, Ephron has something much more formidable, and both of them pretty much hijack the movie. Like Powell, Child was a government employee with an adoring husband, and the extraordinary story of this American woman in post-war France who barged her way into the male bastion of Le Cordon Bleu and brought what she learned back to America is certainly enough for a movie, which it was before Powell's memoir came along. Fortunately Meryl-as-Julia, winking at the audience and chewing the scenery along with the sole meunière — abetted by sight gags that emphasize not only the height difference between the 6' 2" Child and everyone around her but the trickery that has made her from the 5' 6" Streep — soon becomes Just Julia, a large, lumbering lover of life, and her passion for food is infectious, which is not hard when it looks this good.

Meanwhile, Powell suffers Ephronisms like a fight with her husband (Chris Messina) that occurs for no reason other than lack of drama, and a group of shallow, high-strung girlfriends who would never be in this sensitive writer's social circle and thankfully disappear after one scene. They would certainly not approve of all that butter, or the cigarettes the Childs smoke through meals. But if Ephron's romantic comedies usually require a bottle of cheap red and a pint of Ben and Jerry's, this one aspires to something more, and it is impossible to leave the theater without a hankering for boeuf bourguignon.

***½ $9.99
Directed by Tatia Rosenthal. Written by Tatia Rosenthal and Etgar Keret, based on his stories. With the voices of Geoffrey Rush and Anthony LaPaglia. (R)

An unemployed young man spends $9.99 on a book that promises to reveal the meaning of life. His father has a tragic encounter with a panhandler, while his brother, a handsome repo man, has fallen for a supermodel. Meanwhile, a little boy saves up for an action figure, an old man meets his guardian angel and a slacker meets his match in the form of three two-inch-tall surfer dudes. These are the interlocking tales in $9.99, Tatia Rosenthal's stop-motion animated feature about the pursuit of happiness among the denizens of a modern apartment building.

As the presence of those two-inch-tall dudes suggests, we've entered the territory of magic realism, for which animation is particularly well suited, but the mood is that of graphic novels, "Ah, look at all the lonely people" division. The figures, sculpted of silicon, inhabit meticulously furnished apartments, and even their sometimes puffy upper lips do not distract from the story, which this brief film has in spades. All the characters are looking for love, whether they know it or not, and it's a testament to the film's humanity that they all deserve it. We may scoff at the supermodel and repo man's mutual admiration society, but it's he who ultimately makes the greatest sacrifice for love.

$9.99 may be animated, but it is certainly not for kids, and it well makes the case that animation can be used to tell adult stories. It's also, for those who keep tabs on these sorts of things, the first Israeli-Australian co-production. Rosenthal was born in Israel and lives in New York and the film was made in Sydney with an Australian voice cast. The Israeli writer Etgar Keret, with Jellyfish and Wristcutters: A Love Story, is fast becoming a favored supplier of quirky plots for indie filmmakers. With the imaginative, intertwining stories in $9.99, it's easy to see why.

*** Soul Power
Directed by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte. (PG-13)

Before the Rumble in the Jungle, the legendary prizefight between Muhammed Ali and George Foreman, was Zaire '74, a 12-hour, three-day concert of American and Congolese all-stars featuring James Brown, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba, Bill Withers, Celia Cruz and the Spinners. Of those 12 hours Soul Power probably offers less than 40 of its 93 minutes, but it's a blazing 40, and the rest of the documentary, which covers the run-up to the concert and backstage antics, offers a priceless peek at a moment that was certainly significant to its American participants in the waning days of the Black Power movement.

Culled from outtakes from Leon Gast's documentary When We Were Kings, Soul Power offers a tantalizing brief glimpse at what must have been a thrilling concert, limiting each performer except James Brown to one song. The film's structure is lopsided: the preparations for the concert are documented in detail, but once the concert begins the promoters and lighting guys disappear, the movie ending abruptly after James Brown's set.

Far more egregious is the choice to identify the men behind the scenes but not the performers until the closing credits. So, for the record, that's Johnny Pacheco leading the Fania All-Stars and Ray Barretto jamming on the street and a very young Sister Sledge horsing around backstage. The African musicians, including the saxophonist Manu Dibango, Congolese superstar Franco and the James Brown–influenced Trio Madjesi, particularly suffer from the lack of identification. Hugh Masekela, who co-produced the festival but not the film, is only glimpsed once, while his co-producer Stewart Levine, who did produce the film, is featured heavily. Lloyd Price, the other promoter seen in the run-up to the concert, would go on to sue Gast, producer David Sonenberg and Polygram for the rights to the concert footage. But that's a story for another movie.