Meryl Streep's Top 15 Movies Ranked From Worst to Best

15. Death Becomes Her (1992)

Eternal youth turns out to require an alarming amount of maintenance in Death Becomes Her. As fading actress Madeline Ashton, Meryl Streep throws herself into the physical comedy of a woman whose body becomes considerably less durable than her ego. Goldie Hawn makes a wonderfully vicious rival, and Robert Zemeckis lets their beauty obsession get spectacularly ugly. Streep’s theatrical delivery belongs perfectly in a world where even death cannot end an argument. | © Universal Pictures

14. Julie & Julia (2009)

The most appealing relationship in Julie & Julia might be Julia Child’s marriage, although butter puts up a respectable fight. Streep and Stanley Tucci give Julia and Paul an affectionate, teasing intimacy that makes their scenes feel happily inhabited. Nora Ephron alternates Julia’s culinary education with a blogger’s cooking challenge, but Streep’s half has the stronger pull: watching an enthusiastic beginner gradually discover her vocation is a pleasure all its own. | © Columbia Pictures

13. August: Osage County (2013)

Dinner with Violet Weston should come with an evacuation plan. In August: Osage County, Streep plays a mother whose addiction and illness have done nothing to soften her appetite for humiliating her children. Julia Roberts pushes back ferociously as her eldest daughter, Barbara. Adapted from Tracy Letts’s play, the film occasionally buckles under all that shouting, but its sharpest exchanges expose how family members learn cruelty from the people who raised them. | © The Weinstein Company

12. Out of Africa (1985)

You could watch Out of Africa for John Barry’s score and the landscapes alone, but Karen Blixen makes the scenery worth staying in. Streep gives the Danish writer a stubbornness that complicates the film’s sweeping romance with Robert Redford’s fiercely independent Denys Finch Hatton. Its perspective on colonial Kenya deserves scrutiny; its ability to make love feel inseparable from anticipated loss remains powerful. Even the grandest views cannot offer Karen the permanence she wants. | © Universal Pictures

11. The Hours (2002)

Planning a party gives Clarissa Vaughan something to do with feelings she cannot quite manage. Streep anchors the contemporary strand of The Hours, playing a publisher caring for a former lover living with AIDS. Her bustling competence gradually gives way to exhaustion, connecting her story to the women played by Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore. Stephen Daldry’s interwoven drama finds its deepest sadness in the distance between looking fulfilled and feeling it. | © Miramax Films

10. The Post (2017)

A decision to publish becomes a test of who actually gets to exercise power in The Post. Streep’s Katharine Graham owns the newspaper, yet regularly finds herself surrounded by men who seem more comfortable discussing her responsibilities than trusting her judgment. Spielberg keeps the Pentagon Papers story moving briskly, with Tom Hanks supplying editorial impatience. Streep supplies the hesitation that makes Graham’s eventual resolve matter: she understands precisely what she stands to lose. | © 20th Century Fox

9. Silkwood (1983)

Karen Silkwood has bills, relationships and a job to worry about before becoming anybody’s idea of a heroine. That ordinary messiness gives Mike Nichols’s Silkwood its force. Streep plays the nuclear plant worker and union activist with abrasive humor and mounting fear, while Cher and Kurt Russell help establish a convincing home life. When workplace contamination intrudes on that home, the danger becomes horribly intimate rather than an abstract argument about industrial safety. | © ABC Motion Pictures

8. The Bridges of Madison County (1995)

A hand resting on a car-door handle can apparently do more emotional damage than an entire breakup speech. The Bridges of Madison County earns that moment through its patient attention to Francesca, an Iowa housewife whose brief affair offers a startling glimpse of another life. Streep and Clint Eastwood make attraction feel awkward, adult and unexpectedly funny. The heartbreak grows from how seriously the film takes both her desire and her existing commitments. | © Warner Bros.

7. Adaptation (2002)

Anyone expecting a respectful account of how a book becomes a movie should brace themselves for Adaptation. Streep plays a fictionalized Susan Orlean, whose fascination with an orchid collector gets caught inside screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s increasingly unruly invention. Nicolas Cage handles both Kaufman brothers, but Streep provides a crucial longing for something worth feeling passionate about. Her willingness to follow the story into absurdity helps its wildest departures retain an oddly sincere emotional center. | © Columbia Pictures

6. Defending Your Life (1991)

Being dead would be easier without having to watch footage of your most embarrassing decisions. Albert Brooks builds Defending Your Life around an afterlife tribunal that examines whether people have overcome their fears, then introduces Streep’s Julia as a romantic possibility for his anxious protagonist. Her easy enjoyment of the place gives his worrying a lovely comic counterweight. Together, they make a surprisingly persuasive case for taking emotional risks while you still can. | © The Geffen Film Company

5. Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)

Joanna Kramer’s departure leaves a hole in the household; her return makes the audience reconsider the woman who left it. Although Kramer vs. Kramer spends more time with Dustin Hoffman’s newly hands-on father, Streep gives Joanna reasons that cannot be tidily dismissed as selfishness. Her courtroom testimony is especially affecting because explaining herself means exposing her failures. The custody battle hurts because parental love offers no automatic protection against adults wounding each other. | © Columbia Pictures

4. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Miranda Priestly rarely raises her voice; everyone else has already learned to listen. Streep’s beautifully measured performance gives The Devil Wears Prada an authority that its makeover montages and fabulous coats could never supply alone. Against Anne Hathaway’s increasingly compromised assistant, Miranda embodies both professional excellence and the personal cost of serving it. The cerulean sweater lecture is funny because she is devastatingly informed—and because Andy realizes, much too late, that she has underestimated her. | © Fox 2000 Pictures

3. Doubt (2008)

Certainty is Sister Aloysius’s most intimidating possession, and Doubt keeps asking whether she has earned it. Convinced that a priest has behaved inappropriately with a pupil, Streep’s strict school principal confronts Philip Seymour Hoffman in exchanges where every courtesy feels provisional. Viola Davis’s appearance as the boy’s mother unsettles the argument further. Streep makes Aloysius difficult to warm to, yet impossible to brush aside, leaving her protectiveness and authoritarian instincts in uncomfortable proximity. | © Miramax Films

2. Sophie’s Choice (1982)

The famous revelation in Sophie’s Choice can overshadow how much life Streep gives Sophie before we fully understand her past. She is flirtatious, evasive, affectionate and frightened, navigating a turbulent relationship while carrying memories of surviving Auschwitz. Alan J. Pakula’s adaptation allows those contradictions to accumulate painfully. Streep’s command of the role extends far beyond its demanding accents: she makes Sophie’s attempts at happiness as vivid as the trauma that repeatedly interrupts them. | © ITC Entertainment

1. The Deer Hunter (1978)

Before Vietnam tears its central friendships apart, The Deer Hunter spends enough time at home to make us understand what is being lost. Streep’s Linda belongs to that Pennsylvania community, and her tentative connection with Robert De Niro’s returning Michael carries affection complicated by absence and guilt. Her supporting role gives the epic some of its most affecting intimacy. Michael Cimino’s film is fiercely debatable in its depiction of Vietnam, but devastating about the impossibility of simply coming home unchanged. | © EMI Films