OFF-KEY, BUT ON POINT

“DO YOU EVER WATCH THE CLASSIC-MOVIE CHANNELS?” Meryl Streep asks. “Sometimes I do, and I realize how different they are from many films now. They’re like the great novelistic things that are on TV now. Film has decided it’s only going to concern itself with one specific kind of sensate experience. TV has scenes. TV is stylistically adventurous in the way that films were.”

You know cinema is on the decline when an actor as legendary as Streep, 67, who has earned 19 Academy Award nominations over a career spanning four decades, is fantasizing about doing television. But for viewers who share her nostalgia for an era of moviemaking that seems to be disappearing, Streep’s new film, Florence Foster Jenkins, in theaters Aug. 12, should provide relief—at least until the perfect TV