Doubt (dir. John Patrick Shanley, 2008). Shanley adapted his own Tony-winning play into this subtly directed film, a shatteringly candid and complex look at faith and doubt. Doubt is driven by Shanley's crackling script and a host of great performances, including Streep as a shrewd, calculating mother superior and Adams as a timid and conflicted novice nun. The film's greatest strength, though, is that it focuses on issues of discipline and power, two themes that inevitably find their way to the center to any reasonably nuanced work dealing with the subject of faith. [Shanley shortened the title of his original play much to my chagrin—Doubt: A Parable, as it was originally called, is a much more telling title.] A.
The Virgin Spring (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1960). The Virgin Spring, one of Bergman's most overlooked films, finds him still operating firmly in the allegorical mode established in The Seventh Seal, again turning his attention to the battles of the spirit (the film could also be read literally, but I find that an allegorical reading makes more sense of the film's ending). The film's ending finds Bergman at perhaps his most hopeful, yet it is not filmed without what I think is a touch of tension: the moment of divine intervention takes place directly after Bergman defines God as something essentially unintelligible—his motives, if he has them, are incomprehensible. Though Bergman himself thought of this film as mediocre Kurosawa, to me the austere cinematography coupled with the subject matter more readily evokes Dreyer's Day of Wrath. A.
