Streep Outshines the Fragmented 'Iron Lady'

After Julia Child and Miranda Priestly, Margaret Thatcher is another ideal role for Meryl Streep.

It won’t be long before the bio-pic genre starts to run out of iconic figures from 20^th century Britain to base films around. Already audiences have praised The Queen and The King’s Speech, both of which took home a vast number of honors in 2007 and 2011 respectively. Helen Mirren and Colin Firth brought to cinematic life to Elizabeth II and George VI; now Meryl Streep takes her turn in transporting another figure from the noble halls of government to the big screen as Margaret Thatcher. 

Portraying the only female British prime minister cannot be hailed as a cakewalk for Streep. But that doesn’t mean that she can’t tackle the fierceness of The Iron Lady. After all, Streep can play just about anyone from Julia Child to a staunch nun and even a devil in heels. The Iron Lady looks at bits and pieces of Thatcher’s rise to power, her prime and eventual decline, where Streep portrays the latter two eras of her life.

Spielberg's 'War Horse' Journeys Towards Epic Proportions

Steven Spielberg gives audiences not just one, but two movies over the holiday stretch.

If The Adventures of Tintin wasn’t enough Steven Spielberg over the long holiday season, there remains yet one more sprawling epic from the iconic director with the release of War Horse. 2011 isn’t this first instance that Spielberg has released two of his films in the same year. Back in 2005, Spielberg released his vision of War of the Worlds in the midst of summer and Munich, later in the year attracting attention from many critics. 

War Horse comes at the perfect time of the year, fitting the shape of an awards bait film with its epic scale and emotional tension. Though everything points to War Horse being a film that is here to only collect a potential pile of awards, there is so much more that Spielberg delivers in divulging a tale that simply comes down to one about a boy and his horse. And that’s exactly how War Horse begins. An Irish farm boy named Albert (Jeremy Irvine) begins a bond with a recently purchased horse, but when his father is behind on the rent, the horse is thrown into the midst of World War I and continuously changes owners.