Meryl Streep and her daughter Mamie Gummer in Ricki and the Flash via Ricki and the Flash / Sony Pictures
After earning one Academy Award, eight Golden Globe wins, and countless other accolades, Meryl Streep has irrefutably shown that she’s a goddess of the screen and can do no wrong. Since the mid-1970s she’s been proving that there’s no role too challenging and that her range knows no bounds. From romantic epics and weepy heart-tugging tearjerkers to rollicking musical comedies and historical dramas, Streep takes on every role with the strength and ease of a woman completely in command of her craft. This week, her latest tour de force performance comes in Jonathan Demme’s Ricki and the Flash. Playing a hard-partying rocker named Rick Rendazzo, the film follows as she returns home to her family and tries to make up for the wounds caused when she moved to California to pursue her rockstar ambitions decades earlier. Performing everything from Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty classics to Lady Gaga and Pink hits, Streep once again shows off her tremendous vocal prowess alongside her signature natural acting.
To get ready for Ricki and the Flash, take a look back on Streep’s best performances and roles—from sartorial siren Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada to her scorned Rachel Samstat in Heartburn. Peruse our list and see where to check out your favorite Streep films streaming now.
Julia Child in JULIE & JULIA
By now this actress has exhausted every superlative that exists and to suggest that she has outdone herself is only to say that she’s done it again. Her performance goes beyond physical imitation, though she has the rounded shoulders and the fluting voice down perfectly..Often when gifted actors impersonate real, familiar people, they overshadow the originals, so that, for example, you can’t think of Ray Charles without seeing Jamie Foxx, or Truman Capote without envisioning Philip Seymour Hoffman. But Ms. Streep’s incarnation of Julia Child has the opposite effect, making the real Julia, who died in 2004, more vivid, more alive, than ever. — A.O. Scott
Available to watch on iTunes and Amazon Instant Video
Miranda Priestly in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA
The literary Miranda is a monster. Ms. Weisberger, restricting herself to Andy’s point of view and no doubt giving voice to her own loathing of the real-life editor on whom Miranda is modeled, resisted the temptation to make her villain a complex (or even a terribly interesting) character. But the screen Miranda is played by Meryl Streep, an actress who carries nuance in her every pore, and who endows even her lighthearted comic roles with a rich implication of inner life. With her silver hair and pale skin, her whispery diction as perfect as her posture, Ms. Streep’s Miranda inspires both terror and a measure of awe. No longer simply the incarnation of evil, she is now a vision of aristocratic, purposeful and surprisingly human grace. — A.O. Scott
Available to watch on iTunes and Amazon Instant Video
Jane Adler in IT’S COMPLICATED
In her fifth film of the past 18 months, the 60-year-old Meryl Streep, as indefatigable as she is versatile, plays mother-of-three Jane Adler, a baker and caterer with a successful business in Santa Barbara. Her ex-husband, Jake (Alec Baldwin), a handsome, self-consciously charming lawyer somewhat going to seed, is remarried to a younger woman with a five-year-old son and is attempting to have another child. One night staying at New York’s Plaza hotel (where else?) while attending their son’s graduation ceremonies at Columbia, Jane and Jake get drunk together in the Oak Room (from which Cary Grant was abducted in North by Northwest) and finish up in bed. They awake with the coarse Jake fondling Jane’s crotch and shouting: “Home sweet home.” — Guardian
Available to watch on iTunes and Amazon Instant Video
Susan Orlean in ADAPTATION.
Meanwhile, Susan Orlean (played with impish composure by Meryl Streep) falls in with Laroche (Chris Cooper), a haunted, antic autodidact who has been arrested for poaching rare orchids from a Florida swamp. The contrast of their backgrounds and temperaments, hinted at in Ms. Orlean’s book, is wittily realized by Ms. Streep and Mr. Cooper, whose lank-haired, toothless charisma also resonates with Mr. Cage’s improbable magnetism…As the stories unfold in counterpoint, seesawing back and forth in time, ideas pop up like flowers blossoming crazily in time-lapse photographs. It would be futile to try to account for all of them, but the effect is both exhilarating and a little stressful, like a graduate seminar in philosophy conducted by a slightly mad professor, and then edited down into an extralong episode of MTV’s ”Real World.” — A.O. Scott
Available to watch on iTunes and Amazon
Francesca Johnson in THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY
Limited by the vapidity of this material while he trims its excesses with the requisite machete, Mr. Eastwood locates a moving, elegiac love story at the heart of Mr. Waller’s self-congratulatory overkill. The movie has leanness and surprising decency, and Meryl Streep has her best role in years…Looking sturdy and voluptuous in her plain housedress (the year is 1965), Ms. Streep rises straight out of “Christina’s World” to embody all the loneliness and fierce yearning Andrew Wyeth captured on canvas. — Janet Maslin
Available to watch on iTunes and Amazon Instant Video
Madeline Ashton in DEATH BECOMES HER
The film works best when it simply lets its two heroines match wits, since both actresses seem to be reveling in the down-and-dirty aspects of these witchy roles. Obviously, Ms. Streep has never been afraid of taking chances. But this time, in a role that more or less starts out where her comic turn in “She-Devil” left off, she outdoes even herself, daring to look ridiculous or pitiable in some scenes and rising to wonderfully silly heights of Hollywood chic in others. The costumes, by Joanna Johnston, are every bit as drop-dead as the material requires. — Janet Maslin
Available to watch on Amazon Instant Video
Suzanne Vale in POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE
The story involves Suzanne, a young actress who has a more-famous actress for her mother. The father, also famous, has been misplaced somewhere along the way. As the film opens, Suzanne has awakened in the bed of yet another boyfriend she does not quite remember meeting. Her life has become a confusion of blackouts, memory lapses, screw-ups on the set and behavior that baffles even her. All that keeps her going on the set of a movie are the frequent visits to her dressing room of a woman who sells her cocaine.
Streep plays this character with a kind of defiant sweetness that recalls the late Irene Dunne. She is not a bad person, and she doesn’t want to cause trouble for anybody, but her drug usage has befuddled her to the point where she’s not much use. — Roger Ebert
Available to watch on iTunes and Amazon Instant Video
Mary Fisher in SHE-DEVIL
If Barr is correctly cast, so is Streep, who has always had a rich vein of comedy bubbling through her personal life – few people are merrier during interviews – but who has dedicated her career to playing serious or even tragic women, most of them with accents. Here she’s given a juicy role to sink her teeth into: Mary Fisher, the best-selling romance novelist who seems like what would happen if the genes of Barbara Cartland, Jackie Collins and Danielle Steel were combined in the same trash compactor. It’s a role that calls out for broad, fearless interpretation, and Streep has a lot of fun with it. — Roger Ebert
Available to watch on Amazon Instant Video
Rachel Samstat in HEARTBURN
Meryl Streep plays Rachel, a food columnist who has yet to find a recipe for a successful marriage. Miss Streep’s hair is shorter and darker than usual and she talks about having considered a nose job; she is such a good actress that she makes you believe she looks Jewish. Before the opening credits have concluded, she and Mark (Jack Nicholson) have exchanged glances at a wedding. (”Is he single?” she asks. ”He’s famous for it,” says a friend.) In a moment, they have kissed on busy Third Avenue, and before you can say meaningful relationship, they are in bed enjoying her spaghetti carbonara and thinking about marriage.
…Miss Streep has more to work with and finds a remarkable number of ways to register domestic happiness, unhappiness and in-betweens. Part of the time, though, she seems to be fighting the script, as it goes for a gag, sometimes fresh, sometimes familiar, sometimes at the expense of character. Unlike the babies that she carries convincingly through Rachel’s pregnancies, the story has little weight. — NY Times
Available to watch on Netflix, iTunes and Amazon Instant Video
Karen in OUT OF AFRICA
The baroness is played by Meryl Streep. The Hunter is Robert Redford. These are high-voltage stars, and when their chemistry is wrong for romances (as Streep’s was for “Falling in Love,” and Redford’s was for “The Natural”), it is very wrong. This time, it is right.
The movie is based on the life and writings of Baroness Karen Blixen, a Danish woman who, despairing that she would be single forever, married her lover’s brother, moved out to Kenya in East Africa, ran a coffee plantation on the slopes of Kilimanjaro and later, when the plantation was bankrupt and the dream was finshed, wrote books about her experiences under the name Isak Dinesan. Her books are glories – especially Out of Africa and Seven Gothic Tales – but they are not the entire inspiration for this movie. What we have here is an old-fashioned, intelligent, thoughtful love story, told with enough care and attention that we really get involved in the passions among the characters. – Roger Ebert
Available to watch on iTunes and Amazon Instant Video
Sophie in SOPHIE’S CHOICE
Meryl Streep has already established herself as a performer of that caliber, but nothing in her earlier work fully anticipates ”Sophie’s Choice.” In Alan J. Pakula’s faithful screen adaptation of Mr. Styron’s novel, Miss Streep accomplishes the near-impossible, presenting Sophie in believably human terms without losing the scale of Mr. Styron’s invention. In a role affording every opportunity for overstatement, she offers a performance of such measured intensity that the results are by turns exhilarating and heartbreaking. Though it’s far from a flawless movie, ”Sophie’s Choice” is a unified and deeply affecting one. Thanks in large part to Miss Streep’s bravura performance, it’s a film that casts a powerful, uninterrupted spell. — Janet Maslin
Available to watch on Netflix, iTunes and Amazon
Joanna Kramer in KRAMER VS. KRAMER
Though much of Kramer vs. Kramer is occupied with the growing relationship between the abandoned father and son, through tantrums and reconciliations and playground accidents, the central figure is that of the movingly, almost dangerously muddled mother, played by Miss Streep in what is one of the major performances of the year. Joanna is not an easily appealing character, especially when she returns after eighteen months of therapy in California and seeks legal custody of the child she walked out on.
Though beautiful, intelligent, well-educated and no more than casually self-assertive at the start, she grows into one of those fiercely determined people who talks about “finding” herself even as we—and she—suspect there may be nothing to find except another series of compromises. She seems to be a woman in transit to disappointment. Maybe not. She’s not a character who can be conveniently categorized, and she is fascinating. — Vincent Canby
Available to watch on iTunes and Amazon Instant Video
Ricki Rendazzo in RICKI IN THE FLASH
***In theaters Now***
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