Movies

Early reviews of Spotlight are in, and they’re glowing

How many Spotlight puns can we put on one website?

By Bryanna Cappadona @brycappa

November 4, 2015

2 minutes to read

Everything new to theaters is pretty much tanking at the box office right now. But based on early buzz surrounding Spotlight — the film about The Boston Globe’s investigation that exposed the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal — it looks like there might be some much-needed light at the end of the film-flop tunnel. As in, the media is raving about Spotlight.

Rotten Tomatoes currently gives the movie a 94 percent. The site notes that critics generally feel that Spotlight “gracefully handles the lurid details of its fact-based story’’ and resists “temptation to lionize heroes.’’

Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty gave Spotlight an “A,’’ claiming that it’s “the best movie about journalism since All the President’s Men’’:

The film hums as a tense shoe-leather procedural and a heartbreaking morality play that handles personal stories respectfully without losing sight of the bigger, more damning picture.

Anthony Lane at The New Yorkerwrote that the movie is “the year’s least relaxing film’’:

If “Spotlight’’ feels dogged in its procedure, then why does it exert such command? Because, I think, McCarthy is tackling something more basic than paranoia—namely, pride of place, and the way in which it offers both an embrace and a choke hold.

Rolling Stonecalled it “steadily riveting’’ and “quietly devastating,’’ rating it four out of four stars:

It’s these survivors who give Spotlight its beating heart. Roiling emotions are also felt among reporters who desperately want to get the story right and just as desperately want to get it first. That tension makes for an insanely gripping high-wire act and the year’s most thrilling detective story.

Of course, Ty Burr at The Boston Globe, who gave the film four stars, couldn’t be unbiased. (“Neither could you if a film crew came in and made a drama in your office,’’ he wrote in his review.) But he said the press doesn’t just adore the film just because it’s about the press:

One of the reasons that “Spotlight’’ is so deeply, absurdly satisfying to this newspaper writer — and to most of those I’ve spoken with, at the Globe and elsewhere — is that Tom McCarthy’s movie doesn’t turn its journalists into heroes. It just lets them do their jobs, as tedious and critical as those are, with a realism that grips an audience almost in spite of itself.

Spotlight hits theaters November 4.

Who’s who in Spotlight:

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