Latest news with #Doubt:AParable
Daily Record
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Forgotten movie starring four Hollywood legends but fans have only days to watch
Although currently streaming on Netflix, the star-studded film will depart from the streamer next month Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, Doubt is a 2008 drama that's based on Shanley's Pulitzer-prize and Tony Award-winning 2004 stage play Doubt: A Parable. Starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis, Doubt is set in a Catholic elementary school named after St Nicholas in 1964 and tries to confront the issue of sexual abuse within the church. Although currently streaming on Netflix, the film will depart from the streamer on June 4. Having premiered in October, 2008, at the AFI Fest before seeing a wider release in December that year, Doubt earned $51.7 million at the box-office against a budget of $20 million. Although the movie received mixed reviews, Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams were all highly lauded for their performances — each earning an Oscar nomination at the 81st Academy Awards. Doubt was also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the awards that year. In fact, it is only the fourth film to date — joining My Man Godfrey (1936), I Remember Mama (1948), and Othello (1965) — which has received four acting nominations without getting a nod for Best Picture. A critic's review of the film calls it: 'An expert film, with a precision and lucidity in its intellectual quandary that few motion pictures can muster, making the experience at once entertaining and full of substance.' Another reviewer says: 'Doubt comes to the screen with a welcome restraint, relying as much on what is unsaid as on what is said and the kind of stylish visual juxtapositions of those suppers.' One critic feels: 'Doubt is simply, engrossingly thought-provoking and, despite its subdued appearance, is one of the brightest films of the year.' Nevertheless, another wasn't left too impressed, writing: 'Doubt looks like some sort of upscale horror film, complete with crows and swirling leaves like The Omen. It's actually a terminally muddled piece of star-studded Oscar-bait.' An audience review for the film states: 'This film will leave you questioning and doubting. No conclusion as you need to draw your own. Streep was excellent in it and the guy who played the priest.' While another lauds its performances: 'Now that we are many years past the film's aggressive Oscar campaign and the endless debates over the film's effectiveness as an adaptation of a massively successful play, I think we can assess it on its own merits. Frankly I think the movie is very clear eyed about what happened and what this all means and the performances are uniformly great.' One viewer, who was not won over by Shanley's offering, writes: 'Critics and audience alike are all luvvy darling how wonderful what performances blah blah blah. I don't get it. There is no reason for Streep's certainty. "She has no ulterior motive and no proof. She is not mad nor is she looking for revenge. The story is fundamentally flawed.' (sic) On the other hand, some felt the acting was the film's only saving grace: 'I love Meryl Streep, and she really saved this film from sending me to sleep. It was very pedestrian and not a great deal happened. "There was a nice atmosphere, though, and I found Amy Adams's character engaging, too.'
The Courier
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Courier
Review: Doubt: A Parable at Dundee Rep
John Patrick Shanley's 2004 stage play Doubt: A Parable opened off-Broadway and ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award for Best Play. It's a play with a big reputation and legacy, from Shanley's own 2008 film adaptation starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Viola Davis, to last year's Broadway revival with Live Schreiber and Amy Ryan. Here Joanna Bowman directs Dundee Rep Theatre's version, which keeps the American backdrop of the original – a Bronx religious school in 1964, where the relationship between a young male priest and a boy in his care is called into question. The chance to see a modern classic on a Scottish stage; although if you'd like a recommendation from outside theatre, Shanley also won an Academy Award for writing the 1987 Cher and Nicolas Cage film Moonstruck. You know you're in for a high standard all round at Dundee Rep, and the performances are predictably powerful. Ann Louise Ross is especially commanding in the central role of Sister Aloysius, a character who flips the role of strict and widely-feared religious disciplinarian – all of which she is – to reveal an innate morality which causes her to not let go when she smells wrongdoing. The way the play manages to be a contemplative, ecclesiastical piece about the meaning of faith and a tense and utterly involving thriller all at once. All the time we're given mixed signals about who to root for – Sister Aloysius seems stuffy and inflexible, while the accused priest Father Flynn is played with easy-going, youthful warmth by Michael Dylan. Emma Tracey's apprentice Sister James, meanwhile, represents a more open, less disciplinarian form of teaching, but does seeing the good make her blind and naïve Jessica Worrall's impressive set is also a character in itself, a vaulted, concrete-effect sepulchre with a panel which reveals the changing seasons outside. You don't like hearing fake American accents in the theatre. Although the reason for maintaining time and setting becomes clear when we discover the boy in question, Donald Muller, is the only black child at the school. Mercy Ojelade cameos as his complex mother, who's prepared to turn a blind eye because she believes education is his only escape to a better life, and in an already powerful play her single scene is a tour de force. At Dundee Rep Theatre until Saturday 10th May.
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Scotsman
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Theatre reviews: Doubt: A Parable
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Doubt: A Parable, Dundee Rep ★★★★ Nun Of Your Business, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★ It's a strange week for Scottish theatre to be offering two shows focussed on the Catholic Church, its rights, wrongs and follies. After decades of rowdy and robust criticism of the church - not least for its abject historic failure to deal adequately priests guilty of sexual abuse - the late Pope Francis seemed at last to be a leader who represented the best of the church; and the outpouring of grief at his death makes it difficult, this week, to take a simply dismissive view of one of the world's most venerable institutions. Emma Tracey (Sister James) and Ann Louise Ross (Sister Aloysius) in the Dundee Rep production of Doubt: A Parable | Mihaela Bodlovic The danger of complete certainty, though, is exactly what John Patrick Shanley's powerful 2005 play Doubt is about; and in Joanna Bowman's superb Dundee Rep production, it seems both timely and profound. The story - told in a single sweep of 90 minutes, across half a dozen scenes - involves a charismatic young priest, Father Flynn, working in a working-class New York parish with a school attached. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The principal of the school is Sister Aloysius, a hard-bitten old nun who knows the male-dominated hierarchy of the church all too well; and her character and attitudes are explored in a series of dialogues with a young, idealistic teaching nun, Sister James, who finds it difficult to adopt the suspicious and hyper-vigilant attitudes Sister Aloysius demands. So when Sister Aloysius tells Sister James that she is certain - despite very slender evidence - that Father Flynn is pursuing an improper relationship with the one of the boys at the school, both Sister James and the audience are plunged into doubt. Nor does the play ever bring us any huge, cathartic resolution; at the end, even the rock-hard Sister Aloysius is left uncertain about whether her actions have been for the best. Doubt is a complex, inconclusive and yet satisfying modern drama, in other words; and it receives a flawlessly intense production from Bowman's Dundee Rep company, led by a magnificently flinty Ann Louise Ross as Sister Aloysius, and a wonderfully complicated and convincing Michael Dylan as Father Flynn, with fine support from Emma Tracey as Sister James, and a powerful Mercy Ojelade as the mother of the boy. Jessica Worrall's austere set shifts quietly but powerfully between towering, chapel-like interior and brief interludes in the rectory garden. And like all good drama, Doubt leaves us with few answers; yet brings us together in considering a profound range of questions about how we punish wrongdoing and protect victims, while still leaving space for doubt, for understanding, and even for forgiveness. Laura Lovemore and Lee Harris in Nun of Your Business | Tommy Ga-Ken Wan This week's Play, Pie and Pint drama, Nun Of Your Business, by contrast, is a show that might have been designed to be undermined by the fact that its run coincides with this week of mourning. An unsubtle small-scale farce by James Peake, set in the tatty gift shop of a struggling Glasgow church called Saint Boaby's On The Knob, it had to be stripped at short notice of its ruder jokes about the church hierarchy, leaving an already feeble comic situation more or less hopelessly weakened. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The story involves the church's money-grubbing Mammy Superior, played with a desperate intensity by Pauline Goldsmith, trying to boost the parish fortunes by impressing a visiting prelate from Rome with a new miracle-working relic she claims to have discovered. Add in a handsome local cat-burglar in nun drag, a benign but dim-witted young nun - played in fine comic style by Laura Lovemore - who turns out to have Christ-like qualities, and a dead prelate in the sacristy, and you have a play that could only have survived this week by combining a serious satirical intention with some brilliant comic writing; best, perhaps, just to note that Nun of Your Business had neither of those assets, and to move on.
