David Thomson

“If this edition [1994] had reached print by, say, 1989, then surely it would have acknowledged Meryl Streep as the dominant actress in American pictures. At forty, she was not simply regarded as the most talented woman in pictures, but the most distinguished. Distinction is not common praise in movies, nor is it often well intended. The distinguished are somtimes those the public does not love: the term lay heavily on the heads of Olivier, Katharine Hepburn, and even Al Pacino, at times. But at the very end of the eighties, Streep had been brilliant, properly enclosed, and unquestionably Australian in A Cry in the Dark…. [B]ut some reckoned that Streep's presence was by then sufficient warning to wary audiences. She would be superb, rather cold, in a movie that had little vulgar magic. Even critics who admired her had grown weary of the complaint that in her highest flights of skill one felt the strenuous breathing of a mistress technician….

“In two films, she worked very hard to be gorgeous and sexy, yet something failed to click--was it inner restraint, or some fierce certainty that actresses should not sell themselves: The Seduction of Joe Tynan…. and Still of the Night…

“It hardly seemed to matter, for now she was a reigning figure, capable of any accent or period--a labeled great actress: The French Lieutenant's Woman…; luminous, touching, yet oddly remote in Sophie's Choice… as if her very genius led us to see how fake that story is. She was at her best, wilder, more dangerous, and less respectable in Silkwood….

David Thomson
Bio Dictionary of Film, 3rd Edition