Meryl Streep

An "A" for effort...Still, the frayed plot strands of the 2004 Manchurian Candidate make it a lame duck to Frankenheimer's first-term thriller.

If it rarely becomes more than a conventional Hollywood movie with conventional conflicts, at least it remembers to amuse, and has a force of nature in Streep.

A nutty, fictional ode-elegy to a show that's still going strong, A Prairie Home Companion offers a unique hybrid of a folksy American showman and an improvisatory impresario.

Has an ace in its anthill...political allegory that separates this one from the pack.

From its laughably lyrical opening to its bow-tying resolution, Lajos Koltai's Evening invites comparisons to Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movies.

Complete fluff, and proud of it...Once you adjust your senses, however, you're bound to submit to this vacation of a movie.

Good to the last drop: the guilt-drenched final line is a prism revealing new facets of character and theme to ponder on the way out of the theater.

Together the film's parallel stories do make slightly more than the sum of their ingredients, cooking up undemanding summer fun.

Though the film, by necessity, expands Dahl's original story and fuses it to the sensibility of Anderson, author and auteur share a common tone of twisted twee...

There’s a weirdly riveting intensity—and a palpable sense of privilege—to the way the movie takes us into squirmy private moments...

Absent the electricity of live-wire live performance, the play's paucity of depth becomes more obvious. What's left to carry the day are a nasty streak of black comedy and the redoubtable acting ensemble.

Too bad that this junior version of Fahrenheit 451 turned out drippy...It's odd to watch a film about the rediscovery of love, faith, passion, and color, and for the film to be so by-the-numbers colorless.

Mutlilayered...Though any film adaptation of a classic musical is bound to be a mixed bag, Sondheim fans have dodged another bullet here with this impressive transplant, one that retains the play's complicated moral character along with most of its music.

That special brand of La Streep mugging—here applied to the character of a hot-mess bar-band deadbeat mom—will wear you into submission until nothing else seems to matter. Except that it should.

Revives history we could all stand to know better, and proves most useful in clarifying both what was at stake and the rules of the game...

A legitimately fascinating central character...Not surprisingly, Streep expertly shades every eccentricity, embodying Jenkins in her musical waywardness...

The heroic journalism depicted in The Post could hardly be more timely, it’s true, but Spielberg’s take rarely achieves dramatic traction.

Aside from Gerwig's own comic and dramatic sensibilities (which never intrude on Alcott) and a stellar cast, her Little Women adopts a bold narrative approach to retelling Alcott’s two-volume story.