E-Z-Rider

Incredible performances by all 4 lead actors--Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Viola Davis. This may be Hoffman's most powerful and nuanced performance and Streep is her incredible self. But the single most powerful scene for me was the single scene in which Viola Davis appears--for which she got a Best Supporting Actress nomination, along with Adams. Davis should have gotten the Oscar for it. It is a travesty--and an indication of the shallowness of the people who vote for the Academy Awards--that Doubt did not get a single Oscar for the 5 nominations it received.

There is a good idea for a movie here but this wasn't it. It's slow, confusing and boring--and did I say slow? The movie suffers terribly from a self-conscious effort to make viewers grasp the IMPORTANCE of what they're watching, made worse by Clooney's interminable and self-important voice-overs. This is a great cast wasted on what is ultimately a boring docu-drama. It just confirms you should never see a movie where the star is also the director and writer, unless it's Eastwood. Clint would have done something great with this story but Clooney just couldn't--or at least didn't.

This is a truly awful, pointless, interminable movie. Bad acting, no plot to speak of, making no point, giving no insights. The movie is a stream-of-consciousness mess. The idea that this miscarriage made it into the IMDB Top 250 makes me suspect that a studio publicity department has simply paid people to leave fawning reviews--or maybe it's one guy assuming a bunch of identities and leaving multiple fake reviews. I had hoped IMDM is better at policing this kind of misconduct but the obviously doctored reviews for this movie make me doubt the integrity of the IMDB rating process.