UNITED KINGDOM
Daily Mail
Spotlight
Rating: *****
Verdict: Troubling but superb
Judging films, as everyone knows, is a highly subjective business. One person’s unmissable is another’s unwatchable. But with three five-star assessments dished out here in recent weeks (The Revenant, Room and now Spotlight), it seems timely to consider what, from where I’m sitting, makes a film deserving of the full caboodle of stars.
It should surely be one of two things — a film you absolutely have to see, or one that is unimprovable. Only rarely does a movie come along that fulfils both those criteria, but I think Spotlight does.
It tells a seismically important and troubling story with such integrity, such a lack of showiness on the part of the actors and their director, Tom McCarthy, that it would unequivocally get my vote, if only I had one, for Best Picture at next month’s Academy Awards. In both tone and theme, it is strongly reminiscent of 1976 film All The President’s Men: a true story of investigative reporters doggedly uncovering a scandal. But this scandal is far more shocking even than the Watergate conspiracy.
In 2002, the Boston Globe exposed the long, systematic concealment by the Catholic Church of the sexual abuse of children by almost 100 priests in the area.
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