Here is a movie about a startling issue that has so far not been debated on Newsnight or the Today programme: why, oh why, has the Roman Catholic Church historically been so tough on its suspected paedophile priests? It is written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, based on his Pulitzer-winning Broadway stageplay, and from the way it's shot, 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.
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Fr Flynn, a kindly young priest at a US Catholic school in 1964. He clashes with a fiercely reactionary nun, Sister Aloysius: this is a very ripe performance from Meryl Streep, sporting a twangy Bronx Irish accent, spectacles and a silly bonnet, like a mean-mouthed refugee from Arthur Miller's The Crucible. A saucer-eyed junior nun, played by Amy Adams, suspects Fr Flynn of molesting one of the boy pupils; she timidly confides her fears to Sister Aloysius, who armed with nothing but righteous and rigid moral certainty, instantly embarks on her own campaign against the priest.
Doubt looks like a chuckle-headed, 21st-century PC fantasy about how conservative Catholic authority behaved in the early 1960s, anachronistically recasting its severity in such a way as to be sympathetic to modern taste. If a young nun really had informed on a priest, then ferocious elders like Sister Aloysius would surely have sided with that priest - and it would be the young nun who would have suffered, probably packed off to some institution as a delusional hysteric. Streep's stagey final speech is beyond absurdity.