IRELAND
RTE
Director: Tom McCarthy
Starring: Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schriber, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Stanley Tucci, John Slattery.
Duration: 128 minutes
Certificate 15A
Spotlight is essentially All The President’s Men rebooted, with the quarry being the real-life Cardinal Law and errant Boston clergy rather than Richard Nixon and his associates.
Instead of the Washington Post, it’s the Boston Globe doing the hunting down. So you get the long strip-lit office, the serious news story simmering away while the mostly male hacks rib each other about poker and golf and attend baseball games together.
The year is 2001 and a new editor Marty Baron (Liev Schriber) has taken over. After initial suspicions are allayed, he assembles the editorial team and gently but forcefully probes what kind of stories the journalists have been chasing down.
As an outsider – Jewish, non-Catholic – Baron has no residual loyalty to the city, nor indeed has he any particular appreciation of, or much interest in, the city’s Catholic clergy who are respected and admired by many seemingly well-heeled locals for their charity work.
Picking up on a column that he has noticed in the paper which refers to a priest who had been moved to another diocese in 1976, he begins to nudge the team towards taking on the church, in a way that have been hitherto reluctant to do.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.