Doubt

(John Patrick Shanley):

Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams.

Running time: 104 minutes. (15A)

Rating: 3.5/5

After the plastered-on smile of Mamma Mia! The Movie, Meryl Streep is back to prove she is America's best screen actress. Of that, no doubt. She cooks up enough electricity here to power Lichtenstein.

As stagey cinema goes, Doubt is engaging. As a parable of how church child abuse was brushed under the rug, it's riveting. Director John Patrick Shanley (who wrote the play) creates a world of vice-like church control at a school in an Irish-Italian Bronx parish in 1964.

Streep is a grim horror as Sr Aloysius, a pinch-lipped martinet. She keeps a tight rein on the students and a close eye on Fr Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a smiling priest with a touchy-feely attitude. Amy Adams's Sr James is a gentle naïf. She admires the compassion Fr Flynn shows, especially when he takes the school's first black student under his wing. When the kid begins acting strangely, however, Sr James wants to give Fr Flynn the benefit of the doubt. Sr Aloysius, intuitively, does not.

The title refers not to religious doubt but to faith in religious institutions. The film plays on your own doubt too: it creates enough room for Fr Flynn to wiggle. It wants you to second-guess yourself. Sr Aloysius draws him into a verbal mousetrap. That scene between Streep and Hoffman is fizzing. She turns her monster into a human being. Shanley's writing is as solid as a granite church, but he relies too much on the weather to make his film cinematic.