News: Meryl Streep

After her turn in this week’s A Prairie Home Companion, Streep will continue to churn out film appearances like nobody’s business. There’s the usual smattering of heavyweight projects, like Dark Matter, based on the true story of a Chinese academic studying the origins of the universe, Evening, following a dying woman reflecting on her youth and young love as her daughters come to terms with her death, Dirty Tricks, based around the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and fall of Richard Nixon’s presidency, Chaos, taking in the effects of rape and prostitution, and the highly topical Rendition, looking at the secret CIA kidnapping and torture of terror suspects.

Less hard-going are likely to be First Man, where Streep will play a female President of the United States whose husband – to be played by Robert De Niro – sets aside his successful business to help run her campaign, and thriller Wanted, where she’ll star alongside Jennifer Aniston as two convicts who stage a breakout to prove that Aniston’s former cop has been framed for drug trafficking.

Despite the high chances of success of any project with Streep attached, the one most likely to make mega-bucks is surely Lions for Lambs, due out in the UK on 2nd January 2008. Directed by and starring Robert Redford, it is set around a platoon of soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, a Congressman’s dealings with a journalist, and an idealistic university professor attempting to inspire his students. The main reason for its likely success (bar the sure-fire hit-making team-up of Redford and Streep)? It will be Tom Cruise’s first film since his bizarre pre-nuptual antics, and he’s bound to do everything he can to make sure both it – and he – are as good as they can be.