Spotlight Review

McCarthy directs like a man who has decided that any flourish would be a lie. The camera sits at desk height, the offices are lit like offices, and the film's idea of a set piece is four reporters cross checking a church directory against a list of parish assignments. That plainness is the point, and it is why the photography grades low here while the film does not, since nothing in the frame is asking to be admired. The performances are calibrated to match, with Liev Schreiber playing an editor who never raises his voice and Michael Keaton carrying the real subject, which is not the church but the many decent Bostonians who had the story in a drawer and sat on it.

Mark Ruffalo gets the one outburst, and it lands because everything around it has been rationed. Stanley Tucci walks off with two scenes. The last choice, a list of cities scrolling in silence, is the only moment that allows itself to be a gesture, and it devastates precisely because the two hours before it would not. Journalism procedurals are rarely made this well.