Topical Punch.('Doubt' and 'Milk')(Movie review)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

With all-star casts, two new films turn headlines into high drama. John Powers reviews.

Ever since the first talkies, Hollywood has loved retooling Broadway hits into star vehicles designed to cruise straight to the Academy Awards. This year's most high-octane model is surely Doubt, John Patrick Shanley's adaptation of his own Pulitzer-winning play, which takes a topical themesex scandals in the churchand turns it into a neatly constructed tale of innocence and guilt, certainty and skepticism.

Meryl Streep stars as Sister Aloysius, the acerbic, scarily righteous principal of a Catholic school in 1964. When a naive teacher (Amy Adams) tells her that their beloved parish priest, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), may have behaved improperly toward a young African-American boy, Donald (Joseph Foster), she goes after him. Soon Flynn and the good sister are engaged not just in a clash of personalities (he's honey, she's vinegar) but in a battle between his up-to-date ideas and her rigid traditionalism.

If Shanley's flaw is that he's too often glib, his gift lies in disguising this fact by writing scenes that play like gang-busters. By the time we've started doubting that Doubt has anything important to say, we've already been pulled in by its central mysteryand its A-list cast. Hoffman makes a potent Flynn, whose genial charisma can quickly turn to red-faced bullying, and Adams again shows her ability to embody innocent goodness. Although Sister Aloysius should be a showcase for Streep, she keeps veering into shtick. ...