DVD OF THE WEEK

DOUBT *****
Dir: John Patrick Shanley
Starring: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams

I must admit it took me a little while to get round to watching Doubt. I suspect the idea of Meryl Streep at her iciest accusing a priest of molesting a young boy was a little bleak for my generally cheerful disposition.
And indeed it is a very serious piece, but not one lacking in joy and warmth. It is also a gripping story and one filled with multifaceted intriguing characters.
Based on his own Pulitzer Prize and Toni Award-winning play, director Shanley has created a terrific screenplay and the actors take full advantage of the beautifully-crafted dialogue. Hoffman, as the accused priest, is remarkable, offering a complex multilayered performance that keeps the viewer conflicted throughout. Streep is at her most frightening, but always with a hint of humanity, while Amy Adams is pitch-perfect as the optimistic young nun whose accusation sparks the drama and who finds herself torn between sides. In a smaller role Viola Davis fully deserved her Oscar nom as the mother of the possible victim. Around them a fantastically weathered crew make absolutely believable nuns and priests.
Central is the battle between Hoffman's progressive modern priest and Streep's repressive old-school nun. While sympathy lies initially with him – he seems wise and caring and likeable – the possibility that he indeed is a paedophile hovers over the story. That the boy in question is the school's only black pupil adds a further level of complication.
Engrossing stuff which, like the best films, his a satisfying resolution while leaving moral questions hanging and not settling for easy answers.

A lot of cute young things confront the pitfalls of relationships in He's Just Not That Into You (**) but the desperate predictability of the characters and the clichéd obviousness of the 'lessons” they learn (particularly the titular one) make for a fatuous viewing experience. Ben Affleck, Drew Barrymore, Scarlett Johansson and others are pretty enough but seem to be people in their thirties discovering the sort of basic stuff that most people work out at least a decade earlier. The overriding message of the film is that every girl needs a man and needs him to marry her to be happy.

In Spanish time travel film Timecrimes (****) Hector is a regular overweight balding forty-something living in the country with his wife. He watches the local countryside with binoculars and one day sees a naked woman in the woods. He investigates and after finding her seemingly lifeless body is abruptly stabbed in the arm and chased through the woods to a mysterious scientific facility. There he finds a lone scientist who sends him back in time by an hour. So begins a subtle, devilishly clever and engrossing story, with a film noir mood (a good man is inordinately punished for his brief voyeuristic transgression) and small details that become ever more significant as the time loop becomes ever more complex.

Lovers of solid BBC mystery dramas will be chuffed with The Riddle (**) which, although apparently a film, comes on like nothing more than you might see in TV1's Sunday Drama slot. A reporter and a police press officer find themselves entangled in a murder mystery on the bank of the Thames which somehow has something to do with a lost manuscript by Charles Dickens. Casting Vinnie Jones as the reporter stretches credibility but at least he is surrounded by a cast of England's finest, including both Derek Jacobi and Vanessa Redgrave.

Less than five minutes in I joked 'if it turns out that so-and-so is already dead and was a ghost all along I'm going to give this movie one star”. What with an appealing turn from Anne Hathaway as a grief councillor working with the survivors of a plane crash, and an interesting subplot of corporate malfeasance I didn't seriously think this would become into yet another half-baked ghost story with a cop-out ending. But I'm a man of my word so, unless you are more tolerant than me of second-rate supernatural shenanigans, I suggest you avoid Passengers (*).