I’m a lazy film reviewer, but I very much enjoyed seeing Spotlight, and you probably would too.
Netflix will have it soon, or see it in the theatre.
SPOTLIGHT tells the riveting true story of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe investigation that would rock the city and cause a crisis in one of the world’s oldest and most trusted institutions. When the newspaper’s tenacious “Spotlight” team of reporters delves into allegations of abuse in the Catholic Church, their year-long investigation uncovers a decades-long cover-up at the highest levels of Boston’s religious, legal, and government establishment, touching off a wave of revelations around the world. Directed by Academy Award-nominee Tom McCarthy, SPOTLIGHT is a tense investigative dramatic-thriller, tracing the steps to one of the biggest cover-ups in modern times.
- Mark Ruffalo as Michael Rezendes
- Michael Keaton as Walter “Robby” Robin
- Rachel McAdams as Sacha Pfeiffer
- Stanley Tucci as Mitchell Garabedian
- Liev Schreiber as Marty Baron
- John Slattery as Ben Bradlee, Jr.
- Billy Crudup as Eric MacLeish
(click here to continue reading Spotlight (2015) – Rotten Tomatoes.)
Spotlight doesn’t resort to typical Hollywood clichés, there are zero car chases, there are no weapons being brandished, there isn’t a heart-pumping scene where a villain is just around the corner about to catch the hero as dramatic music swells, there is not even a heavy-handed monologue from some powerful higher-up at the Boston Globe trying to shut down the whole investigation. The reporters who make up the Spotlight team aren’t presented as larger-than-life super-humans, there are zero scenes about someone coming in drunk and belligerent, zero scenes about love-interests that have nothing to do with the plot, but simply exist to give “depth” to the character. The journalists slowly, methodically practice journalism, a dying art form.
Instead, the film follows what actually happened as an investigative journalism team composed of Roman Catholics discovers how the institutions fail to protect the vulnerable. Cardinal Bernard Law doesn’t even get his comeuppance (in this lifetime, anyway).
Wow. Highly recommended.