Hal Hinson

“Poised and diligent, with her skewed Madonna features, Meryl Streep is the class valedictorian of the new breed of young movie actors. Streep is the embodiment of the modern, unversity-trained, classical actor. She slips into each new character with amazing proficiency, and each one--the Southern lobbyist, the melancholy Victorian, the memory-haunted Pole, the martyred nuclear worker--ap[pears to be equally within her range. Streep approaches her characters with a scholarly thoroughness. Her performances are meticulously footnoted; every detail is filled in. In her big roles, like Sophie or Karen Silkwood, where the performance requires an accent or a physical change, we felt the weight of research behind her transformation into a character. In this sense, Streep is the most intellectual of the new actors. Watching her on screen, we always sense her mind at work, calculating reacting, weighing her choices. As Karen Silkwood, she's never at rest; her eyes bounce from side to side in their sockets and she pulls feverishly on cigarette after cigarette. She's so high strung that you can almost hear the thoughts buzzing inside her head. But in Silkwood, Streep's moody restlessness isn't expressive. Her performance has a surface authenticity but her empathy with the character doesn't go very deep, and she never really comes to life.”

Hal Hinson
"The Naked and the Bred"
Boston Phoenix, October 2, 1984