Writer-director John Patrick Shanley adapts his Pulitzer Prize-winning play into an incendiary battle of wills involving a demagogic nun (Meryl Streep) who's convinced that the parish priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is engaged in sexual misconduct with a 12-year-old male student (Joseph Foster II) in their Bronx grade school. A top-notch ensemble cast is excellently aided by Amy Adams as a young nun and Viola Davis as the young boy's mother.