Cinema: Facing your demons

The Devil Wears Prada shows a world of excess that is surprisingly alluring while down south, Heart of Gold shows that this Neil Young's down-home twang will never go out of style, says Declan Burke

Following the time-honoured narrative arc of movies like The Secret of My Success and Bright Lights, Big City, The Devil Wears Prada (15s) is a fairly predictable film: gauche innocent Andrea (Anne Hathaway) secures an internship with high-powered New York fashion magazine Runway and learns the hard way that ethics and principles are considered déclassé when it comes to scaling the ladder of success.

Appropriately for a movie set in the world of fashion, this is far more concerned with exploiting surface appearance than in revealing depth or substance; but surprisingly, the result is a very entertaining movie indeed.

The titular 'devil' is loosely based on Anne Wintour, former editor of Vogue and played here by Meryl Streep. To say that she's an excessively demanding martinet is to considerably understate the case. Mind you, Andrea doesn't help her case: the wannabe investigative journalist shows up for work on her first day dressed like an Oxfam-haunting girl guide, which suggests her research capabilities are less than they should be. The whole point, of course, is to establish confrontational opposites: when she encounters the stick-insect 'glamazons' who work at Runway, Andrea is at first cowed by their sophisticated sense of style, but then decides to knuckle down and adapt. Naturally, it's only a matter of time before her values are challenged and the true Andrea is revealed.

While the performances are strong – Streep, boasting a silvery barnet, is so understated she seems to drift through proceedings like dry ice, while Hathaway is surprisingly adept at giving her clichéd role contours and nuances – the real star here is the fashion world itself. Initially a glittering bitchfest peopled by superficial fashionistas to whom 'no sense of style' is the ultimate insult, the movie becomes something of a Beginner's Guide to Fashion, and even goes so far as to stake a claim for fashion as art. Tongues may well be wedged firmly in cheeks at various points, but there's no denying that the director, David Frankel, has created a world that is as alluring as it is repellent – and even though the ending is as predictable as any ugly duckling tale, there's a slickness to the shallow proceedings that make it as irresistible as the rainbow in a petrol-tinged puddle.

The setting for Neil Young: Heart of Gold (G) is at a far remove from that of New York's style-conscious environs: the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, to be precise, legendary home of the Grand Ol' Opry and the stage for a live recording of the premiere of Young's latest collection, Prairie Wind. Directed by Jonathan Demme, this has the feel of a down-home, understated Stop Making Sense, with the new material leavened every now and again by old favourites such as Harvest Moon and Needle and the Damage Done. Weaving the personal and the political courtesy of that famous nasal-inflected twang, Young's emotional resonance proves that, while he may have fallen out of fashion somewhat, he'll never go out of style.

The Devil Wears Prada ****

Neil Young: Heart of Gold ****