13 Standout Meryl Streep Movies Across Her Career
Ever wonder how one person can master every accent on Earth and still have time to collect awards like they’re loyalty points?
Meryl Streep has spent decades hopping genres, stealing scenes, and making “range” look like an understatement. She can break your heart, fix it, and deliver a punchline before the popcorn’s gone cold.
So what’s the secret to her legendary status? These films make a very convincing case.
Note: This article highlights select films from Meryl Streep’s career using widely reported release information and publicly available records. The list is subjective, and descriptions reflect commentary on performances and storytelling, with reactions varying by viewer, era, and context.
13. Mamma Mia! (2008)
Sun-drenched Greek island sets the stage where everyone suddenly bursts into ABBA songs without warning. Meryl Streep dives into every musical number with the energy of someone who has been waiting an entire career for a moment like this.
Charm comes not from technical perfection but from watching someone clearly having the time of her life onscreen.
Her Donna Sheridan carries the spirit of that aunt who turns every family gathering into an impromptu dance party.
Unexpected box-office juggernaut status followed because audiences embraced the film’s pure and unfiltered joy.
12. The Post (2017)
Katharine Graham sits at a mahogany desk, weighing a decision that could destroy her newspaper or defend democracy. Streep plays The Washington Post publisher with quiet steel, never reaching for melodrama.
The tension builds through boardroom conversations and late-night phone calls.
Her performance reminds you that courage often looks like someone simply refusing to back down. Spielberg directs with his usual craftsmanship, but Streep anchors every scene with understated authority that feels earned, not announced.
11. Julie & Julia (2009)
Towering over a Parisian kitchen counter, Julia Child whacks at ingredients with infectious enthusiasm.
With uncanny precision, Streep captures the voice without slipping into caricature, revealing the chef’s sincere delight in butter and bones. Appetite and curiosity spark in every scene, giving the kitchen an energy that feels almost contagious.
While the story splits time between two women, most memories cling to Streep’s scenes because she turns culinary passion into the warmest kind of love affair.
Anyone watching would want to cook beside her version of Child, even if every dish ended up hopelessly burned.
10. Doubt (2008)
Sister Aloysius suspects something terrible but can’t prove it.
Streep builds the entire performance on sideways glances and clipped sentences that land like accusations. The film becomes a moral chess match where every conversation doubles as warfare.
Her nun isn’t a villain or a hero but something more unsettling: a true believer convinced she’s right. Philip Seymour Hoffman matches her intensity, but Streep controls the temperature in every scene, turning doubt itself into a weapon that cuts both ways.
9. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
With a slight tilt of her sunglasses, Miranda Priestly can ruin someone’s day using only three quiet words.
In Streep’s hands, a supporting role becomes a cultural phenomenon that makes icy professionalism seem almost admirable.
Rather than turning into a cartoon villain, the character emerges as a layered study of power and loneliness. While Anne Hathaway anchors the story, perfectly timed pauses and a voice sharp enough to chill the room lets Streep quietly steal every scene.
8. Adaptation (2002)
Susan Orlean tracks rare orchids through Florida swamps, searching for something she can’t quite name.
Streep plays the New Yorker writer with layered intelligence, revealing contradictions slowly. The film spirals into metafictional chaos, but her performance stays grounded even as the plot goes wonderfully off the rails.
She makes obsession look both ridiculous and deeply human. Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay gives her room to be funny, sad, and slightly unhinged, often in the same scene.
7. The Bridges Of Madison County (1995)
One quiet afternoon, Francesca stands in her Iowa kitchen when a photographer knocks, and four days change everything. Through subtle gestures, Streep makes longing visible, portraying a woman who built a good life that never fully felt like her own.
Behind the camera, Clint Eastwood directs with a tenderness rarely seen in his other work.
Decades of small compromises show in her posture alone, giving the romance a sense of weight and truth. Few love stories let viewers understand both the affair and the choice to let it go, yet she makes each path feel equally honest.
6. A Cry In The Dark (1988)
Lindy Chamberlain says a dingo took her baby, and Australia decides she’s lying.
Streep plays Lindy Chamberlain with an accent that became a major talking point, but the real achievement is how she shows someone trapped by public perception. The film examines how grief gets misread as guilt.
Her Chamberlain never performs innocence, which makes the injustice more infuriating. It’s one of her most controlled performances, all tension held just beneath the surface like a scream you can’t let out.
5. Out Of Africa (1985)
Arriving in Kenya with one future in mind, Karen Blixen ends up building another from the wreckage of her plans. Streep gives the Danish writer a core of quiet determination, never reducing her to someone simply romantic or tragic.
Sweeping landscapes fill the screen, yet her performance remains intimate and grounded.
Colonial privilege becomes quietly uncomfortable without turning the character into a lecture, while Robert Redford brings star power and Streep supplies the emotional weight that keeps the epic centered on one woman’s stubborn heart.
4. Silkwood (1983)
At a plutonium plant, Karen Silkwood begins asking questions that quickly turn dangerous.
Gone is any movie-star glamour, as Streep plays the whistleblower as an ordinary woman who feels fear and keeps going anyway. Raw energy drives the performance, built from exhaustion and stubbornness instead of grand heroic speeches.
Behind the camera, Mike Nichols directs with documentary-style attention to working-class detail.
Fluorescent lights, shift-work fatigue, and a slow-building dread that something is very wrong come through so clearly that silence from those in charge feels just as frightening.
3. The Deer Hunter (1978)
Linda waits in a Pennsylvania steel town while the men she loves go to Vietnam and come back broken. Streep was still early in her film career but already showing the emotional precision that would define her work.
She plays grief and loyalty without sentimentality.
The film belongs to Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken, but Streep holds the home front with quiet devastation. Her Linda becomes the witness to trauma, watching people she knows disappear even when they’re standing right there.
2. Kramer Vs. Kramer (1979)
Joanna Kramer walks out on her family, then fights to get her son back. Streep makes you understand both decisions without asking for sympathy.
The courtroom scenes crackle with adult pain that most movies avoid.
Her Oscar-winning supporting performance works because she refuses to soften the character’s edges or explain away her choices. Dustin Hoffman provides the emotional fireworks, but Streep delivers the complexity, playing a woman Hollywood usually flattens into villain or victim and making her devastatingly, uncomfortably human instead.
1. Sophie’s Choice (1982)
Burdened by a secret so terrible, Sophie moves through the present as if every moment is already haunted.
Complete transformation defines Streep’s work here, as she vanishes into the Polish Holocaust survivor with equal command of accent and emotional damage.
Gradual buildup leads to a revelation that still lands like a punch to the gut decades later. Few performances set standards that last for generations, yet hers became a benchmark by portraying unimaginable trauma without exploitation.
Long after release, that role remains proof she could do anything, and forty years on, almost no one has tried to argue otherwise.
