Not The Best Movie of 2015

Rating: 6/10 (4 September 2018)

This won the Best Film at the Oscars 2016 over The Revenant, The Big Short, and Mad Max: Fury Road. That got me interested because I loved every one of those movies that year. "Man this has to be a great movie if it won over the movie that Leo finally got his Oscar in," I thought to myself as I selected it from Netflix.
Spotlight follows the story of the Boston Globe special reporting team of the same name as they uncover child molestation and abuse in the catholic church. The story itself is really an interesting story. The pacing of the movie is fluid and it never bored me. Every time there was a break in the case, a rush of excitement hit me. I'm glad they didn't focus too much time on 9/11, as I was afraid it would just kill all the momentum it had been rolling up the whole way. The performances of everyone, especially Mark Ruffalo and Michael Keaton, were great. Liev Schreiber was a commanding presence in the movie as well, with his quiet, but almost intimidating role as the main editor.
But other than the great acting and an interesting plot, nothing really is special about the movie. The movie is boring to just look at visually. No colors stand out in a wash of grey, white, and black. I get that maybe it's because duh newspaper, but it is not a movie for spectacle. The camera work was really boring as well. No interesting shots or composition were to be seen in the whole film. I watched it maybe 3 days ago and I can't, for the life of me, remember any scene vividly. Nothing was noteworthy of my memory.
It's an interesting story, an important story, but shot in the most boring and drab way. It has a lot to say with great acting, but it just failed to really wow me.