Before and After (1996)

When their teenage son is suspected of murder, Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson, as the boy's parents, must grapple with small-town police friends, lawyers, vigilantes, and their own feelings of culpability over covering up the crime, in Barbet Schroeder's earnest but a touch too pat adaptation of Rosellen Brown's book.

★★★☆☆

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Still of the Night (1982)

Roy Schneider is a psychiatrist - the sort role Cary Grant plays in a Hitchcock thriller - and Meryl Streep is the blonde femme fatale who comes to him for help when her lover (his patient) is found murdered, in this enjoyable but dopey tv-grade mystery thriller full of attempts at classic Hitchcock thriller moments - a dream sequence, psychobabble, auction-house hijinx - but all delivered in a laughable threadbare plot.

★★★☆☆

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It's Complicated (2009)

Some of Nancy Meyer's movies are so clean, so sanitised, with sets so "interior-designed" they feel like laundry detergeant commercials, but she keeps things more down-to-earth and more relatable in this romantic comedy, another movie in which she squarely targets a more mature generation of female movie-goer, this time telling the story about a woman (Meryl Streep) who embarks upon an affair with her married ex-husband (Alec Baldwin) while keeping up appearances with her adult children and with the architect (Steve Martin) renovating her house.

★★★★☆

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Out Of Africa (1985)

Based on Karen Blixen's 1937 memoir of her time spent in British East Africa, Sydney Pollack's unhurried romance stars Meryl Streep, her porcelain skin, Robert Redford, and his blue eyes, and tells a sweeping, poetic, heartbreaking love story - no, not between Streep's Blixen and Redford's Denys but between Blixen and the object of her profoundest love: verdant, spectacular Kenya.

★★★★★

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Little Women (2019)

One strategy to try and make Louisa May Alcott's obnoxious Little Women tolerable viewing for anyone who has already sat through the seven or eight other adaptations is to populate it with Hollywood's most affected performers and rip through the story at a relentless pace after throwing the scenes into the air and presenting them in the order you pick them up off the floor.

★★★☆☆

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Death Becomes Her (1992)

Goldie Hawn, Meryl Streep and Bruce Willis ham it up in this gothic black comedy about anti-ageing, but really the movie is just a thin excuse to showcase special effects that wowed in the day.

★★★☆☆

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Adaptation (2002)

Adapting US journalist Susan Orlean's novel The Orchid Thief for the big screen causes screenplay writer Charlie Kaufman an existential crisis because it is a largely narrative-free contemplation on flowers and disappointment, but by inserting himself into the story and finding parallels between his own midlife crisis and the article's eponymous hero Laroche's obsessive work hunting the elusive ghost orchid, Kaufman succeeds in creating a thought-provoking and often funny, self-referential drama that won Meryl Streep an Oscar for her performance as Orlean.

★★★★☆

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Into the Woods (2014)

If you can look past the fact this whole elaborate tangle of fairytales could have been avoided if the characters stopped their incessant singing and just sat down and calmly talked to one another, and if you are not repelled by the movie's several unpleasant adult-child relationships, you might enjoy this star-studded film version of the long-running Broadway musical featuring Meryl Streep doing her best Witchy Poo.

★★☆☆☆

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Florence Foster Jenkins (2016)

Meryl Streep endears completely as the title character (part Dame Edna, part Hyacinth Bucket and a good part deluded blind auditioner on The Voice), but the central character is Florence's pianist - it is through his eyes that the audience observes the comedy of Florence's situation (she thinks she can sing but can't and it's hilarious) but the movie's sympathetic approach isn't convincing: Hugh Grant is a cheater, gaslighter and enabler, Florence's pianist and beneficiary loves her on the basis of one moment of dishwashing, and the movie's final line from Florence on her deathbed, while poignant and apparently factual, jars with what the movie has presented before.

★★★☆☆

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The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Anne Hathaway is Andrea, the skeptical fashion magazine employee not fulfilling her role as assistant to Meryl Streep's editor Miranda Priestley, a monstrous, hilarious melding of Anna Wintour and Cruella de Vil, but after some soul searching and styling by Stanley Tucci, Andrea steps up, work life changes for the better, the way she walks improves - she starts strutting - but on the other hand her relationships suffer.

★★★★☆

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Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)

Wes Anderson brings Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox to life in his usual self-consciously quirky way, occasionally amusing with his all-American The Honeymooners approach to the British text, but more occasionally irking.

★★★☆☆

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