Many a procedural, be it “Zodiac” or “Zero Dark Thirty,” has created suspense by following a straight, chronological line towards its ultimate result or finding. Tom McCarthy’s “Spotlight,” a story of the Boston Globe‘s uncovering of widespread sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, takes a slightly different approach to achieve a similar goal. His screenplay, co-written with Josh Singer, treats the journalistic investigation like solving a Rubik’s Cube.
In order to understand the magnitude of the discovery made by the Spotlight team, a four-person squad of the Globe‘s finest inquirers, it is crucial to grasp just how complex and intertwined all the key players were. The molestation was committed by over eighty priests in the Boston area, which alone is a staggering and abhorrent finding. But the complex web of officials in the church, in the government and in the community who enabled the abuse and remained complicit in their silence makes for the real story. Not even the press, celebrated as it is in the film, gets off without a slap on the wrist.
“Spotlight” respects the work of the team enough not to simplify their work into a simplified narrative. It feels effortless to watch and manageable to comprehend since McCarthy directs the proceedings with great agility, pivoting from one strand of thought to another without ever causing motion sickness. Perhaps only when the film nears its foregone conclusion, the publication of the earth-shattering article, do we fully realize just how many crossed wires they had to untangle.
As I watched the climax of “The Hunger Games” series, my mind drifted away from the action on screen thanks to the presence of a fairly blatantly digitized Philip Seymour Hoffman. The resemblance was uncanny, sure, but everything about his facial expressions and mannerisms were wrong.
Sincerity has gone out of style in the world of adult filmmaking, perhaps as a sort of defense mechanism against the ever encroaching threat of extinction. (That’s just speculation on my part, though.) So it always feels refreshing when a film like “
Here’s something that generally serves as harbinger for an undeveloped movie: if a movie has to say its title multiple times to continually telegraph its themes. Bonus points if said theme is also the film’s title.
Bradley Cooper is among the most interesting American actors working today, so it’s a shame that he chose such an uninteresting project like “
If someone were to cross the cross-cultural outlandish humor of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” with the sociological insight of Aziz Ansari’s book “Modern Romance,” it would probably look a lot like the documentary “
We still live in a time where deeply internal, emotional performances from male screen actors are rare – especially from younger ones. Perhaps because most major roles for men are written with external, goal-driven motivations as opposed to looking within, the smart career move is to position oneself for those. But every once in a while, a miraculous turn appears.
Disney’s expensive attempt at an experiment, “
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If your memory of inspirational Internet stories only extends as far as the last Upworthy story your random high school acquaintance shared on Facebook, the documentary “
Marshall and the Movies 
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