Meryl Streep stars as Margaret Thatcher in this surprising and intimate portrait of the first and only female Prime Minster of the United Kingdom. Smashing through the barriers of gender and class, Thatcher is arguably one of the 20th century's most influential women. THE IRON LADY weaves the intricacies of Thatcher's personal life with her policy decisions, focusing on the price that she paid for power.
Writer-director Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird) has crafted a Little Women that draws on both the classic novel and the writings of Louisa May Alcott, and unfolds as the author’s alter ego, Jo March, reflects back and forth on her fictional life. In Gerwig’s take, the beloved story of the March sisters – four young women each determined to live life on their own terms – is both timeless and timely.
A thrilling drama about the unlikely partnership between The Washington Posts Katharine Graham (Streep), the first female publisher of a major American newspaper, and editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks), as they race to catch up with The New York Times to expose a massive cover-up of government secrets that spanned three decades and four U.S. Presidents. The two must overcome their differences as they risk their careers and their very freedom to help bring long-buried truths to light.
It's delightful to see Meryl Streep come into her own as a romantic comedian in her later career years--after all the accolades, the Oscars, the serious-as-marble dramatic roles. Streep is in fact a true cutup, as she has demonstrated in films like Mamma Mia and Julie & Julia--and she gets the guy. So if Nancy Meyers's It's Complicated is perhaps a bit facile in the plot department, it's saved by a splendid romp of a performance by Streep (as Jane), along with her two leading men, Alec Baldwin (Jane's ex-husband, Jake) and Steve Martin (her supposed boyfriend, Adam).
The delirious sight of Meryl Streep leading a river of multigenerational women singing "Dancing Queen" is one of the high points of Mamma Mia!, the musical built around the songs of the hugely popular pop group ABBA. The plot sets in motion when Sophie (Amanda Seyfried, Mean Girls), daughter of Donna (Streep), sends a letter to three men, inviting them to her wedding--because after reading her mother's diary, she suspects that one of them is her father.
This clever, funny big-screen adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's best-seller takes some of the snarky bite out of the chick lit book, but smoothes out the characters' boxy edges to make a more satisfying movie. There's no doubt The Devil Wears Prada belongs to Meryl Streep, who turns in an Oscar-worthy (seriously!) strut as the monster editor-in-chief of Runway, an elite fashion magazine full of size-0, impossibly well-dressed plebes. This makes new second-assistant Andrea (Anne Hathaway), who's smart but an unacceptable size 6, stick out like a sore thumb.
If you spliced Charles Addams, Dr. Seuss, Charles Dickens, Edward Gorey, and Roald Dahl into a Tim Burtonesque landscape, you'd surely come up with something like Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Many critics (in mostly mixed reviews) wondered why Burton didn't direct this comically morbid adaptation of the first three books in the popular series by Daniel Handler (a.k.a.
The Manchurian Candidate, a classic of paranoid cinema from the 1960s, gets a cunning update, rife with hot-topic references to corporate war profiteering and electronic voting machines. Major Ben Marco (Denzel Washington, Training Day) has been haunted by nightmares ever since a firefight during the first Gulf War--a battle in which he believes he was saved by the heroism of Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber, Kate & Leopold). But Marco's nightmares suggest otherwise and drive him to investigate what happened, which may threaten Shaw's candidacy for vice-president.
The sunny streets of Brooklyn, just after World War II. A young would-be writer named Stingo (Peter MacNicol) shares a boarding house with beautiful Polish immigrant Sophie (Meryl Streep) and her tempestuous lover, Nathan (Kevin Kline); their friendship changes his life. This adaptation of the bestselling novel by William Styron is faithful to the point of being reverential, which is not always the right way to make a film come to life. But director Alan J.
Nominated for two Academy Awards in 1979, and considered "one of Allen's most enduring accomplishments" (Boxoffice), Manhattan is a wry, touching and finely rendered portrait of modern relationships set against the backdrop of urban alienation. Sumptuously photographed in black-and-white (Allen's first film in that format), and accompanied by a magnificent Gershwin score, Woody Allen's aesthetic triumph is a "prismatic portrait of a time and a place that may be studied decades hence." --Time Magazine.
