The Iron Lady: Critic Reviews

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.

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.

On the rare occasions when the film does allow her to become nastily political, this Margaret comes alive.

A breezy, whistle-stop tour through the unstable nitroglycerin of Thatcher's life and times.

Though not illuminating as a historical biopic, the film features a tour-de-force performance by Meryl Streep.

[Streep's] performance overpowers the movie it's in - a perfectly executed triple axel that renders everything else just featureless ice.

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.

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...

Those hoping for insight into the life and times of Margaret Thatcher herself will leave deeply disappointed.

Takes a blandly nonpartisan approach to one of the most controversial, as well as influential, politicians in British history.

Often "The Iron Lady" relies on montages to get to - and plow through - historic high points.

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.

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.

An oddly unsettling compound of glorification and malice that whirls around and winds up nowhere.

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.

Streep's performance of a dismissive line such as "People don't think anymore, they feel," will have even the most dyed-in-the-wool liberal questioning core beliefs.

Yes, it's a strangely de-politicized portrait of Britain's first female prime minister. But what's there is actually enough.

Streep, no fan of Thatcher, nicely undercuts the poignancy of her current condition with flashbacks that reveal her brittle arrogance in office.

The portrait that Streep delivers in Phyllida Lloyd's impressionistic biopic is astonishing.

Yes, Streep is wondrous as usual, but her superpowers have been squandered here.

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.

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.

Glosses over the former British prime minister's politics in favor of a glib, breakneck whirl around her career and marriage.

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.

Streep gets under the skin of one of the 20th century's most dynamic and also most contained personalities.