Excellent and Exciting Film in the Tradition of "All the President's Men"

Rating: 10/10 (23 January 2016)

"Spotlight" is the "All the President's Men" of a new movie generation.
Establishing a journalistic tone that matches the film's setting, it tells the story of a Boston newspaper team's efforts to expose the sexual abuse running rampant throughout the Catholic Church. It's a film with hardly a misstep or false note. Eschewing the histrionics and emotional manipulation that other films would have brought to the same material, "Spotlight" understands that the screenplay and actors hired to interpret it are strong enough without any emotional embellishment, and the film is far more powerful because of the understated approach. The entire cast is at top form, with Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, and John Slattery as the standouts (Ruffalo in particular delivers an impassioned soliloquy so emotionally powerful that it nearly brought me to tears), but this is an ensemble film with actors working together like a well-oiled machine, and it seems unfair to single out any one when they're all so good.
Director Tom McCarthy is most known for his work to date on the Pixar movies, and you couldn't find a movie further away from the colorful palettes and winsome stories of the Pixar world. But he proves himself a versatile filmmaker, one who knows how to handle extremely varied material. It would be easy to discount the direction of this film, but one should not underestimate how difficult directing a film that consists almost entirely of conversations would be. And when one also considers that part of good directing is getting good performances from actors, McCarthy's goes down as some of the best directing of the year.
So far, this and "Mad Max: Fury Road" are my two favorite movies of the year. How's that for opposite sides of the movie spectrum?
Grade: A+