Film review: Spotlight

Spotlight is an intelligent and classy film, reviewer Christine Powley says.

SPOTLIGHT
Director: Tom McCarthy
Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liv Schreiber, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Brian d'Arcy James, Paul Guilfoyle, Jamey Sheridan, Billy Crudup
Rating: (M)
★★★★★

There will be plenty of you who, like me, will wonder if you really want to see a film about the paedophile priest scandal in Boston. Surprisingly, the answer is yes. You really do.

Spotlight (Rialto and Metro) follows the Spotlight team of investigative journalists at The Boston Globe, who are as doubtful as the audience when asked to check the rumours. Are a few rogue priests really worth their expertise?

The team is surprised to quickly find 13 bad priests, but when they talk to an academic he tells them their numbers are low. His research suggests a 6% level, which statistically means Boston should have about 90 of these guys in their ranks. The team is stunned but how can they prove it?

Then someone has the idea to use the Church's own language of evasion to reverse engineer a list of priests, and sure enough they come up with 87 names.

Now, before any Catholics out there get huffy about the Church being used as an easy punching bag, that is not the approach of Spotlight. There is plenty of guilt to go around.

If the priests were free to abuse, it was because the law deferred to the Church and the newspapers were not interested in a story their readers did not want to hear. And before we get all smug and say Boston is not New Zealand, the film ends with a long list of places this has occurred and New Zealand appears twice.

Absorbing, sad, well-acted and directed, Spotlight is an intelligent and classy start to the year.

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