UNITED STATES
Religion News Service
Brian Truitt / USA Today | November 6, 2015
No need to bury the lede: Spotlight is a masterpiece.
Director Tom McCarthy’s drama (**** out of four; rated R; opens Friday in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, nationwide Nov. 20) embraces both great cinema and even better journalism as it chronicles a Boston Globe investigative team’s real-life expose on child abuse by local priests and the Catholic Church cover-up that followed. Not only is it an amazingly crafted movie, it’s an important one as well.
The Globe group won a Pulitzer Prize for its 2002 work, but the real tale begins a year earlier with the arrival of new boss Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) to the newspaper. He wants to see the Globe dig into some really hefty stuff, like following up on a recent column accusing a priest of sexually molesting dozens of kids over three decades.
Led by editor Robby Robinson (Michael Keaton), the Spotlight team is initially wary of setting aside other projects and taking on the church, a hot-button subject in town and one of the most sacred of cows. Yet reporters Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) and Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), with the help of mustached ace researcher Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James), begin to dig into what’s been going on and find victims as well as more damning, shocking evidence.
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