Spotlight is the best film of the year (and an excellent film too!)

Rating: 8/10 (13 December 2015)

Although it pains me to say this, I suppose that it is the truth, and therefore, cannot be brushed off as inconsequential: Spotlight is the best film that I have seen this year. I say this with some regret, because prior to having seen this film, I was convinced that no film could surpass the quality of Mad Max: Fury Road, and much of the films deemed as "Oscar bait" were little more than senseless, boring, over-acted, and rudely political dramas.
Ah well. Apparently politics has its place.
Spotlight is All the President's Men for my generation, in that it takes pity on our decrepit attention span and limited intellectual capacity, opting instead for a slower, less spastic narrative that successfully engages our minds without leaving us choking on its dust. If anything, it's a much better film than Pakula's classic, because it takes Redford and Hoffman's breakneck sleuthing, and intersperses it with an unexpected but welcome dose of real and painful human emotion. While Pakula's characters were inconsistent, McCarthys' have satisfying arcs and much more depth. Spotlight is focused and ambitious, and yet, manages to be an emotional experience.
Spotlight deals with a rather uncomfortable subject, and to its credit, refuses to water it down with taciturn dialogue and unceremonious character interactions. It is raw, and occasionally explicit (only in the verbal sense), the film conveying the real-life events of the discovery of sexual abuse towards children in the Catholic Church with all the fury that such a story should entail. Mark Ruffalo stars as Mike Rezendes, a reporter working on the "Spotlight" team at the Boston Globe in 2001. The film follows the same structure as All the President's Men, in that much of its running time is consumed by searching through records, convincing people to testify, and awkward interviews.
The one and only thing I didn't like about the film was Mark Ruffalo's performance, which, considering the fact that he was the main character, interfered with my enjoyment of the film. His character seemed to hover precariously between sociopathic and sensitive, making it seem as if Ruffalo felt out of place in his own skin. At times he is passionate, at other times he is unfeelingly ambitious and rude. I suppose that the journalist character has been, to a certain extent, narrowed down to an uninteresting clichÃ© of ambition and insensitivity. But, to McCarthy's credit, while Rezendes is often rude and tiresome, he has moments of riveting and unsettling emotion, transforming him from an ambitious journalist to an passionate and sensitive individual.
Taking into consideration the intellectual effect that the film manages to captivate the audience with, Ruffalo's performance is only a slight restraint. Spotlight is riveting and fun, giving the audience a well-deserved break from sloppy, boring dramas that critics seem to lap up without the slightest consideration as to how good the film actually is. It's a film that is good because it is made with sensitivity and intelligence, rather than a film that succeeds based on a label or on a performance. Taking into consideration the films I have seen, I can say with a certain degree of confidence that Spotlight is the best film of 2015.