Andy (Anne Hathaway, left) whispers some important information to her boss, fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), as Miranda's first assistant, Emily (Emily Blunt) looks on.

Meryl Streep is the queen and she rules "The Devil Wears Prada" with frosty command, a one-woman corrective to global warming.

In this droll comedy Streep is Miranda Priestly (rhymes with beastly), absolute dictator of Runway magazine, which is to fashion as the Bible is to Western religion.

Streep plays her as Cruella DeVil, her hair a halo of platinum and her voice softer than cashmere, swathed in the pelts of endangered species — including those of her personal assistants.

Enter frumpy Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), idealist in corduroy, out to start a career in journalism. Andy isn't impressed by the imperious Miranda, which is why she gets hired.

Will Andy learn from the Evil Queen or become her next human sacrifice? To hear Miranda murmur her trademark signoff, "That's all," makes Andy tremble for her life. Yet under this reign of terror, Andy also finds strengths and talents she didn't know she possessed.

"Prada's" source material, the hiss-and-tell novel by Lauren Weisberger (who once toiled for Vogue magazine fashion priestess Anna Wintour), is a bash-the-boss affair cloaked in when-bad-employers-happen-to-good-people moralism.Streep's deliciously nuanced turn suggests another reading, entirely. In David Frankel's film, good people are not as angelic as they think they are — nor bad people as diabolical.A frequent director of the TV series "Sex and the City" and "Entourage," and son of a former New York Times executive editor, Frankel knows something of media royals and courtiers.His film zings with unzipped quips about the insular universe of rag mags, where the length of a hemline and color of a season are accorded moral significance.It also vibrates with the cutthroat bitchery of an office culture where being thin and masochistic are job requirements. As Miranda's first assistant, Emily, and her art director, Nigel, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci are perfection.Into this milieu blunders Andy, who believes that if she can stick out a year with Miranda she can get hired anywhere in New York.As in "The Princess Diaries," Hathaway plays the protege as a daisy who remakes herself into a rose. Here, under the tutelage of Miranda, she comes to love her thorns.Though Hathaway is the central figure and looks lovely in a series of increasingly chic Chanel ensembles, Streep dominates the movie in the great comic performance of her career.Setting her face into a mask of composure that suggests Darth Vader by way of a Kabuki actor, the most expressive of American actresses shows how power is expressed in the lack of facial and vocal expression. This makes the brief moment her mask comes off chillingly poignant and eerily funny. For a moment I was reminded of Jeremy Irons' performance in "Reversal of Fortune."That's all.