The Iron Lady Reviews
Yes, Streep is wondrous as usual, but her superpowers have been squandered here.
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| Original Score: C-
Globe and Mail
Top CriticThe Iron Lady is a performance in search of a film.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Often "The Iron Lady" relies on montages to get to - and plow through - historic high points.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
[Streep's] performance overpowers the movie it's in - a perfectly executed triple axel that renders everything else just featureless ice.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Streep's performance is so true and so uncannily accurate, so full and so complete in its understanding, that she is fascinating every second she is onscreen.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Streep, no fan of Thatcher, nicely undercuts the poignancy of her current condition with flashbacks that reveal her brittle arrogance in office.
While the rest of "The Iron Lady" fades quickly in memory, Meryl Streep's performance in the title role remains startlingly present.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Everything Streep does here is a seismic act of theater. If she so much as tilts her head, the earth tilts with it. She doesn't simply overwhelm this thin historic biography - and the other actors around her - she detonates it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The portrait that Streep delivers in Phyllida Lloyd's impressionistic biopic is astonishing.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Streep is Oscar-worthy here, as she almost always is, which is hardly a surprise, and the historic subject matter is fascinating whichever way your politics may lean.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
A stylized biography of one of the most powerful women in politics, portrayed by the greatest actress of our time, that asks more questions than it answers.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Even if you have little interest in Thatcher or why she mattered, you'll likely respond to the contradictory yet charismatic character that Streep has conjured from truth and myth.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Yes, it's a strangely de-politicized portrait of Britain's first female prime minister. But what's there is actually enough.
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| Original Score: 3/4
You have to be very talented to work with Meryl Streep. It also helps to know how to use her. "The Iron Lady" fails in both of these categories.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Streep gets under the skin of one of the 20th century's most dynamic and also most contained personalities.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Streep and Broadbent are entirely watchable, and Thatcher's story, even in its vague and watered-down state, is inherently interesting.
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| Original Score: B-
Certainly, it's worth seeing and arguing over, but my personal take on Thatcher remains unchanged, Streep's virtuoso ministrations notwithstanding.
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| Original Score: 3/5
It isn't Streep's fault that The Iron Lady ends up feeling so uninvolving and oddly dour.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Maudlin and ham-fisted, The Iron Lady is cinematic scrap metal.
Streep is... pitch perfect. Much like her Julia Child in Julie and Julia, she goes way beyond impersonation. But even Streep can't single-handedly give depth and nuance to a movie so briskly content with skimming surfaces both political and psychological.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
The screenplay is pedestrian and the acting, including that of star Meryl Streep, is unmemorable.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
If it weren't for Streep, The Iron Lady would be unwatchable.
The film views Thatcher with sympathy and admiration; the effect is a strange movie that manages to compel while also coming off as shortsighted.
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| Original Score: 3/4
No matter your politics, [Streep] makes you see Thatcher as a real person rather than a caricature.
Takes a blandly nonpartisan approach to one of the most controversial, as well as influential, politicians in British history.
The film stars an unsurpassable Meryl Streep, whose ability to empathize with her characters has never been more gloriously impassioned than it is in this titanic performance.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
What "The Iron Lady" does contain - what makes it worth watching - is a literally amazing performance by Meryl Streep ...
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Though not illuminating as a historical biopic, the film features a tour-de-force performance by Meryl Streep.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
An affecting if not always satisfying portrait of the strong-willed leader humbled by age.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Those hoping for insight into the life and times of Margaret Thatcher herself will leave deeply disappointed.
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| Original Score: 2/5
The Iron Lady is shallow but satisfying, largely because of Meryl Streep and her big fake English teeth and gift for using mimicry as a means of achieving empathy.
The Iron Lady is a clever and oddly touching entertainment.
You are left with the impression of an old woman who can't quite remember who she used to be and of a movie that is not so sure either.
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| Original Score: 2/5
Is there anything that Meryl Streep can't do as an actress? One can only marvel at her virtuoso performance as Britain's Margaret Thatcher in 'The Iron Lady.'
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Thatcher contains multitudes; she is rife with contradictions you can barely glimpse in this modestly affecting movie.
The Iron Lady is a conventional biopic with one great performance and a few memorable scenes.
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| Original Score: 3.0/5
Despite the story's conceit of placing the viewer inside Thatcher's head, she never feels like a real person -- but this is more the fault of Morgan's script than Streep's typically studied performance...
An oddly unsettling compound of glorification and malice that whirls around and winds up nowhere.
For as much of a mess as this movie is, there are moments in which Streep and Broadbent draw it into a sharp humanist focus. But they don't occur often enough.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Even the greatest actress of our time can only do so much when the figure she's playing just isn't on the page.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Streep is her own irresistible show as she assumes, with the precision that is her trademark, the character of the U.K.'s staunchly conservative prime minister in the 1980s.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
There's nothing even Ms. Streep's craft and resourcefulness can do to make this cold, humorless woman of iron likeable, and the whole thing is too dry to sustain so much screen time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
There's barely an incident from the right honourable PM's regime that Lloyd doesn't gild with distracting Dutch angles or chintzy archival-footage montages.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Playing both the staunch human battleship and the diminished old woman sifting through her past, Meryl Streep is riveting in The Iron Lady.
Glosses over the former British prime minister's politics in favor of a glib, breakneck whirl around her career and marriage.
