BeSummers Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

ianlouisiana "Iron Lady" opens with a CCTV - style view from above the counter of a convenience store where a frail -looking old lady in a mackintosh and headscarf is faffing around and muttering to herself as she buys a carton of milk. As the camera moves in we see that this is not in fact a frail old lady but Hollywood Great Meryl Streep pretending to be a frail old lady and bent double under the weight of facial prosthetics. She then pretends tp shuffle along the street,looking like nothing more than Julie Walters pretending to be a frail,mad old lady. And so it goes on,Miss Streep in varying degrees of Margaret Thatcher make - up and giving a technically assured but mannered and rather cold performance that is bound to please her many admirers. This is mainly about Mrs T's sad descent into dementia in her later years and viewed as such is competently but in no way outstandingly made. Miss Streep may look like Margaret Thatcher but she fails capture her.That is left to the estimable Miss Alexandra Roach who captures Margaret Roberts in her somewhat gauche persona,a blank page to a certain extent to be a willing subject of the Svengali - like Denis. As she loses touch with reality she sees her late husband as a clownish figure in a continuing fantasy and the film ends with Denis walking out of the door in his socks. How much of "The Iron Lady" is truth I do not pretend to know and it is unlikely to persuade pro or anti factions to change their opinions of this ultimately sad figure. Personally I consider the film not to be as good as its proponents nor as bad as its detractors. If you are a Streepomane you will love it.

Howlin Wolf "Thatcher: The Frail Years" seems both exploitative, and undeservedly sentimental...It's not that it doesn't cover the bad stuff - but the fact that it takes the form of an elderly lady experiencing a long dark night of the soul affords her a distance from her most famous battles that is entirely unwarranted.She suffered... and maybe what goes around comes around - but other people are still suffering from the effects of her policies, and they don't all get a movie of their own.It's all a bit shallow, and smacks of (very fine) actors playing dress- up, instead of the immersive experience it could and SHOULD have been.

john_meyer This film is told from the perspective of Thatcher when she was a doddering, senile old woman. This would work if used as a starting point, but as the film grinds on, you eventually realize that THAT is all the movie is about: Margaret Thatcher as a senile old woman remembering, in fits and starts, various disjointed and isolated memories of her time as Britain's first female prime minister.The director and writer made no attempt to provide any insight into how Thatcher actually made any of her decisions. Also missing was any sense of how the events she attempted to shape actually came to be or, in many cases, any description of what those events really were. As one example, the Falklands conflict just pops up in one scene, with no prologue or explanation. Then, in the next scene, without any explanation, she decides to fight a war.As another example, bombs go off at various points in the movie, without any explanation. Even more inexplicably, after her residence is bombed, there are no subsequent scenes that follow up on this dramatic and troubling scene.The entire film is like this, with each scene having nothing much to do with anything that has come before. In a word, this film is haphazard.Having watched this movie, I know nothing more about Margaret Thatcher; nothing whatsoever about the British conservative movement of the 1980s; and nothing about how Thatcher changed Britain and the world.This is a movie that is about one thing: Meryl Streep's incredible impersonation of Thatcher. It is nothing more than that: there is no plot; no beginning, middle, or end; no characters that anyone could possibly care about; and no explanation whatsoever for anything the main character says or does.When the credits thankfully finally appeared, I cursed the director and writer of this movie for wasting my time, wasting the talents of a great actress, and for totally failing to tell us anything about one of the most remarkable and important leaders of the 20th century.Skip this movie: you will miss nothing.

Prismark10 Mrs Thatcher was a divisive figure in British life. I had little time for the woman but my Thatcherite friends would deem this bio-pic with an Oscar winning performance by Merly Streep to be a lampoon made by people who did not like her.It is a vapid film filled with montages and flashbacks as it goes through her period as Prime Minister, adored by forty percent of the nation and despised by the other sixty.It is framed as an elderly Mrs Thatcher in the first stages of senility and well into drunkenness as she has imaginary conversations with her beloved Denis who passed away a few years earlier.We see her taking her first steps towards a male dominated Westminster but skates over the fact that there were other females MPs and other female Cabinet Ministers before her.In fact the film plays rather loose with the facts, the most unsavoury one being the politician Airey Neave being blown up by Irish terrorists and Mrs Thatcher rushing to the scene of the incident.It is a pallid production that was only made as Oscar bait for Meryl Streep who in her customary way transforms herself as Mrs Thatcher but I never believed in her.