Spotlight (2015)

original title: Spotlight
directed by: Tom McCarthy
written by: Josh Singer, Tom McCarthy
photography by: Masanobu Takayanagi
edited by: Tom McArdle
music by: Howard Shore
cast: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams
imdb

Spotlight tells the story of the journalists team from the Boston Globe that unconvered the child abuse scandal in the Catholic church in Boston, USA. The movie focuses in the journalist investigation, and not in the abuses or the covering of them. So if you are looking for a drama on child abuse or an anti-clerical pamphlet this is not your movie.

It is interesting to compare Spotlight with Truth (2015). Based also on a true journalist story, but with a very different ending (that we will not expose here). But despite having also great actors, Truth has an evening telemovie smell that Spotlight doesn't have. It is quite disappointing because Truth's writer (who is also director) is the same of David Fincher's Zodiac (2007). And one wonders what David Fincher would have done with the Spotlight screenplay.

Spotlight is a very good movie, a great journalists movie, but it's not the best movie of the year, even for American egocentric cinmeatic standards.

It has a really good screenplay and wonderful actors. Technically is perfect, but still... There's nothing wonderful about it, wonderful in the sense of what the best movie of the year should have.

In some sense, Spotlight's case is the opposite of The Revenant (2015); there is something great in Iñárritu's directing, there's a gorgeous epic in it, but the problem of The Revenant is another: the screenplay seems to enjoy showing suffering and pain and becomes emotionally tiring at some moment.