I’m a junkie for newspaper dramas, from Park Row to All the President’s Men to Shattered Glass, and Spotlight promises to be a good or even a great one, with a gifted writer-director and a powerhouse cast. Thomas McCarthy—whose dramas The Station Agent (2003), The Visitor (2007), and Win Win (2011) mark him as one of the more original voices in American indie cinema—focuses on the Boston Globe‘s “Spotlight” investigative team, whose January 2002 series “Abuse in the Catholic Church” exposed the Boston archdiocese’s harboring of pedophile priests. Michael Keaton stars as Walter Robinson, the editor who ran the investigation, and among his reporters are Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo. That’s not all: John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, and Liev Screiber are Globe execs anticipating the political shit storm that will follow once the story is published, and Billy Crudup and Jamey Sheridan play attorneys for the victims and the church, respectively. When you get that many good actors in one place at one time, you must have a pretty good script, and the story promises to open out from the perpetrators to the church hierarchy to the larger community that sustained, if not supported, decades of abuse.
Opens Fri 11/6, general release