Daily Plastic: Doubt

Movie	Our Take	Other Takes
Doubt Trailer . IMDB	I do give the film credit for at least keeping the audience in doubt....Still, it’s not that hard to keep an audience suspended between two poles. What’s much more difficult is to provide a satisfying ending to such an exercise. In that, Doubt utterly fails. J. Robert Parks Daily Plastic	Director John Patrick Shanley, who adapted the screenplay from his own hit drama, makes all the classic stage-to-screen mistakes. He writes in new characters to flesh out what was a spare four-person show; dutifully "opens out" the story by setting random scenes in public places; and hammers home thematic points with overly neat visual reinforcements. (When in trouble, he cuts to a close-up of something: a cross, a cup of tea, a trembling hand.) Dana Stevens Slate Mr. Shanley has nothing deep to say about the church and its sex scandals, and he’s still largely using words and more words, despite the tilted camera angles and pretty pictures. But the words are good, solid, at times touching. Manohla Dargis New York Times but... Doubt is still overpowering; it took me a while when it was over to stop shaking. It’s the dramatist’s business to sow doubt, to set down points of view that can’t be reconciled, and Shanley makes visceral the notion that one can be right but never absolutely right, that doubt might be our last, best hope. David Edelstein New York Magazine

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