You may well have spotted this very funny (and frequently accurate) Onion piece doing the web rounds today, in which a writer claiming to be Meryl Streep shoots down her career with all the withering disdain of Miranda Priestly.
The gist of the argument is that, as fine an actor as Streep is, she has — whether through bad luck or bad choices — never made a truly great film.
I can see the temptation to agree. Certainly the latter stretch of Streep’s filmography is spotty: even if you remove the outright embarrassments, (“Prime,” “Mamma Mia!”) or even the respectable-but-still-throwaway entertainments (“Julie & Julia,” “The Devil Wears Prada”), you’re left with a lot of worthily middlebrow titles engineered more as performance showcases than as vital, durable cinema.