That Shelf

Sometimes a movie that deserves a spot on a critic’s ten worst films list ends up being excluded because of a technicality. The beetle-headed Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady should almost dead to rights be quite high up on the list of 2011's cinematic atrocities, but thanks to limited Oscar qualifying runs in New York and Los Angeles at the end of the year I felt it wrong to talk about the film in too much depth before its proper wide release. It wasn’t embargoed at all, but I felt it was still too early. That time for charity is over. This movie’s an outright trainwreck with a central performance that isn’t half as good as the work that Meryl Streep has shown in the past.