Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 34% approval rating based on 204 reviews with an average rating of 5.2/10. The site's critical consensus reads "The scenery is nice to look at, and Julia Roberts is as luminous as ever, but without the spiritual and emotional weight of the book that inspired it, Eat Pray Love is too shallow to resonate." On Metacritic, it has a score of 50 based on reviews from 39 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade B on scale of A to F.
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film 1 out of 5 stars, beginning his review "Sit, watch, groan. Yawn, fidget, stretch. Eat Snickers, pray for end of dire film about Julia Roberts' emotional growth, love the fact it can't last forever. Wince, daydream, frown. Resent script, resent acting, resent dinky tripartite structure. Grit teeth, clench fists, focus on plot. Troubled traveller Julia finds fulfilment through exotic foreign cuisine, exotic foreign religion, sex with exotic foreign Javier Bardem. Film patronises Italians, Indians, Indonesians. Julia finds spirituality, rejects rat race, gives Balinese therapist 16 grand to buy house. Balinese therapist is grateful, thankful, humble. Sigh, blink, sniff. Check watch, groan, slump." In 2025 Bradshaw retrospectively downgraded his score to zero stars, describing it as "pure moviemaking horror" and stating "I can feel myself worrying that zero is generous."
Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe gave the film 3 out of 4 stars while writing "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." San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle overall positively reviewed the film and praised Murphy's "sensitive and tasteful direction" as it "finds way to illuminate and amplify Gilbert's thoughts and emotions, which are central to the story".
Negative reviews appeared in The Chicago Reader, in which Andrea Gronvall commented that the film is "ass-numbingly wrong", and Rolling Stone, in which Peter Travers referred to watching it as "being trapped with a person of privilege who won't stop with the whine whine whine." Humor website Something Awful ran a scathing review. Martin R. "Vargo" Schneider highlighted several aspects of the film that he considered completely unrealistic. Political columnist Maureen Dowd termed the film "navel-gazing drivel" in October 2010.
The BBC's Mark Kermode listed the film as 4th on his list of Worst Films of the Year, saying: "Eat Pray Love... vomit. A film with the message that learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all, although I think the people who made that film loved themselves rather too much."
In The Huffington Post, critic Jenna Busch wrote:
Eat Pray Love is ultimately charming and inspirational. Though it doesn't have quite the impact of the book, it will likely leave you pondering your life choices and forgiving your flaws. It will certainly have you forgiving the few flaws in the film. The performances are just too fantastic, the vistas too lovely to pay too much attention to anything else.
In the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, journalist Curzio Maltese wrote:
How many platitudes fit in a two-hour-twenty-minutes-long movie? Several, if Eat Pray Love is anything to go by. Sure, if TV director Ryan Murphy's directing weren't so slow, even more would. For example, in the long part shot in Rome, the mandolin is conspicuously absent. There's a shower of spaghetti, Italians who gesticulate all the time and shout vulgarities as they follow foreign girls around. [...] There's lots of pizza. But no mandolin. Why? [...] Goes without saying that the story would've surprised us more if Julia had found out how well one can eat in Mumbai, how much they pray in Indonesia, and how one can fall in love even in the Grande Raccordo Anulare, possibly avoiding rush hour.
The film received generally negative reviews in the Italian press.
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