"Upon divesting its' development slate of projects like Ali, About Schmidt and The Shipping News in the late 90's, Sony chairman John Calley uttered these immortal words:  “We're not going to make movies for audiences that need to be dynamited out of their homes.”  He was only saying aloud what most of the industry was thinking, as the era when Saving Private Ryan and Armageddon could co-exist as 1998's two 200 million dollar grossers gave way to the one in which no non-franchise drama grossed 100 million this year.  What happened?  Sure, there was a whole lot of self-fulfilling babble about home theaters and DVDs, but the truth of the matter is that drama as a genre got labeled with a scarlet B for an entire generation of moviegoers.  And, yes, just as a good many action movies and comedies are soul-numbingly stupid, a good many dramas are a tad, er, deliberate.  But I have come here to tell you that it need not always be so.  In the right hands, a filmed stage play about a couple of nuns wondering if their Priest has “acted inappropriately” toward a Catholic school student can emerge as the year's most gripping thriller.  That play is Doubt, brilliantly adapted and directed by Pulitzer-winner John Patrick Shanley.  In addition to his, the hands are those of actors Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Viola Davis, who make every one of his ever-so-carefully chosen words cause to perch on the edge of our seat.... Shanley wrote the Tony-winning play and won the Pulitzer for it, so the credit his brilliantly observed dialog and cleverly designed story deserve is unquestionable.  But in only his second outing as director (the other being the 20-year-old cult favorite Joe vs. the Volcano), he has a perfect sense of how to make this material work on screen.  He doesn't just open the locations up by taking a number of scenes outside, he makes the cold a character.  As someone who's lived in the Northeast all my life, I can tell you that a woman sitting on a bench thinking in the middle of December is thinking about something bad, because otherwise she'd be doing it indoors.  And he takes advantage of all sorts of subtle ways to make the indoor scenes cinematic, tilting the camera at odd angles to increase our unease and using the noises of that creaky old school (and a ringing phone) to maximum benefit.  Some directors know what scares us:  here, Shanley knows what makes us uncomfortable, and he goes to it early and often...Doubt gripped me from almost its' first frame and never let me go because I believed in these characters and I cared about not just what happened to them but about the answer to its' maddeningly unanswerable central question.  Watching acting this good is its' own reward, but Doubt allows you to double-dip by putting it in the middle of a truly sensational story.  Yes, Virginia, there is still great drama at the movies.  Don't make me bring the dynamite to get you to it."

12/31/08:  "Three times through, sounds like an annual tradition to me!  Hang the ornaments, trim the tree, it's time for that most criticy of activities, the annual Lamar's Movie Palace Ten Best List!  Topped by a movie I'd anticipated for three years and one that jumped me like a bandit in the night on the next-to-last day of the year, this eclectic list once again celebrates the fact that until you see them, you just never know what movies will sing to you.  This, as I'm fond of saying, is why we play 'em.  And who'd have guessed that after two years of siding with low-grossing, unheralded contrarian picks as the year's best film, this year I'd be on the bandwagon with the highest grossing film of the year.  Looks like you guys get it right once in a while.  Or something like that...

Without further ado, offered with the caveat that as an unpaid citizen, I have not yet seen many of the movies on the pros' Top 10 Lists, placed there only to tease us mortals who'll have to create a separate list for them next year should they live up to the hype" MORE