UNITED STATES
Entertainment Weekly
BY JEFF LABRECQUE • @JEFFLABRECQUE
“Journalistic thriller” doesn’t really qualify as its own movie genre. There’s All the President’s Men, of course, and The Parallax View and State of Play, to a degree. But typically, reporters and their editors are depicted as rumpled cynics, lending the profession a more comic slant when it shows up on screen, in movies like The Philadelphia Story or The Paper.
Spotlight, however, will have journos and cinephiles sitting on the edge of their seats. The new film from director Tom McCarthy, who co-wrote the script with Josh Singer (The Fifth Estate), is based on the Boston Globe investigative reporting team that published the 2002 series of articles exposing how the local Catholic Church, under the powerful Cardinal Bernard Law, had knowingly shielded scores of known pedophile priests for decades, allowing them to prey on countless children again and again. The stories were proved to be a bombshell, and the impact reverberated far beyond Boston. (Cardinal Law resigned less than a year after the news first broke.) In 2003, the Globe’s Spotlight team was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
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.