Turning a Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play into a screenplay and hiring four great film actors is a sure recipe for a great movie, and Doubt delivers. Everything revolves around the tension between Streep as the hard-as-nails nun/principal of St. Nicholas Church school and Hoffman as the parish’s laid-back priest. These two titans of the screen collide in a clash of cultures, traditional versus modern, severe versus loving, righteous versus forgiving. Amy Adams as the young nun/teacher Sister James is caught smack in the middle. Viola Davis has a short but emotionally moving role as the mother of the school’s only black student. The resolution of the conflict is just as powerful as the acting, too. Bravo to writer/director John Patrick Shanley. Very well done.

About a third of the way through this film, I realized I had read the play several years back. For whatever reason, this prior knowledge of the story drained much of the excitement I had in viewing this movie.

Still, it was well casted, good story, and great performances. Some of the scenes were exactly as I imagined them when I originally read the play; unfortunately, this gave me the feeling that I had already seen the movie and I just wasn’t that interested in viewing it a second time.

Obviously the John Patrick Shanley is a great writer and brings out the best in his actors (4 Oscar nominees for acting in one pic), but I think his directorial style robbed the movie of some of its punch. Too many off-kilter angles and a reliance on jumping from close-up to close-up during conversations – I think a better director would have easily found the film nominated for Best Picture. I was surprised to find out that he was also the writer and director of Joe Versus the Volcano, a film I really admire and which couldn’t be more different from Doubt.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep: two of the finest actors of our time…without a doubt.(Wow, that was lame.) All bad puns aside, watching these two work is a pleasure. The fact that four of the actors and the writer of this film were nominated for Oscars and none of them won probably says a lot about the strength of the field nominated for 2008. Definiitely statue worthy for both the performances and the screenplay. Great movie making that would have won in other years.