Florence Foster Jenkins

2016 / UK/France / 110 min. / Colour

Director: Stephen Frears

Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, Simon Helberg, Rebecca Ferguson, Nina Arianda

Always admired but not necessarily liked, Mama Mia! started Streep’s repositioning as an International Treasure. Her performance in this film deserves to complete the transition. She plays the real-life eponymous character – a New York heiress who used her wealth to achieve her dream of becoming an opera singer despite her truly painful lack of any singing ability. As opera impresario, Ira Siff, said: “She is the anti-Callas. Exquisitely bad, so bad that it added up to quite a good evening of theater. She would stray from the music and do insightful and instinctual things with her voice, but in a terribly distorted way. There was no end to the horribleness. Cole Porter had to bang his cane into his foot in order not to laugh out loud when she sang. She was that bad.” Hugh Grant plays her husband and manager, proving he still has it in him. Warm, funny and highly enjoyable.