Meryl streep

The Devil Wears Prada (2006) is one of those films which, if chanced upon when flicking television channels, I will always stick with for a bit. It has zing. It has bite. It has memorable lines that I can remember without having to look them up. (‘Are we going to a hideous skirt convention?’) But mostly it has Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, the wonderfully toxic editor-in-chief of Runway fashion magazine. She is still terrific. But while the landscape has moved on, the characters have remained the same and halfway through I started to drift. Another blow is that it’s become more sentimental and less satirical. In other words – and I hate to be the one to say it – it’s not as good as the original. Where are we, 20 years on?

The news that Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump drama The Apprentice has flopped in its first weekend at the US box office, taking in a mere $1.6 million from 1,740 locations across the country, may not be as surprising as liberal critics might suspect. The film received decent rather than adulatory reviews, many of which suggested that its portrayal of the young Donald Trump and his relationship with his mentor Roy Cohn was either too generous or unfairly maligned the younger Trump, depending on where your individual politics stood.

The third series of the hit comedy-mystery series Only Murders in the Building has arrived on Hulu, to the same critical acclaim as the previous two installments, and the adventures of Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez show few signs of coming to an end. This time the trio are joined by none other than acting royalty Meryl Streep, playing Loretta, a plucky but frustrated actress who has never advanced to the big time, and Paul Rudd, the supposedly nicest man in Hollywood, deliberately cast against type as the obnoxious and entitled star of the show that Short is directing on Broadway, which he is hoping will restore his fortunes: a desire cruelly frustrated by Rudd’s character dropping dead on opening night.

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were not, as the title of a recent documentary would have us believe, the last movie stars. Nor are movie stars — as Jennifer Aniston suggests in a November Variety profile — extinct. As long as there are big screens, stars will occur, perhaps only accidentally. The reality, though, is that the business may no longer need them. Before Hollywood figured out how to sell you a movie you didn’t want to see, way back in the old studio days when advertising a movie was as easy-breezy as sticking up a poster and few lobby cards at your local theater, you didn’t need to be sold a movie to take an interest. You just needed to be told it was coming. Because if it had a star you liked, you’d go. That’s what a star was: a means to sell you a ticket.