If you like All the President’s Men (1976), you will probably enjoy Spotlight just as I did. Possibly one of the best films I’ve seen this year!

Spotlight is a section within the Boston Globes dedicated to investigative journalism, so they spend months on a single story. In the movie, based on real events, Walter ‘Robby’ Robinson (Michael Keaton) is the head of the team, which also has Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James). It’s 2001 and their new assignment is to investigate allegations of child abuse by priests of the Catholic Church in Boston.

Little by little, they find out a massive scheme to cover up the cases, which involves not only members of the Church, but also lawyers and members of the government.

The subject is disturbing by itself and it gets more uncomfortable when the journalists interview victims – now fully grown-ups -, who describe how priests took advantage of their position to molest them. Another aspect that makes the film more intriguing: the number of churches that appear in it. Filmed on location, there is a church in the background of almost every place the journalists go (including one right next to a children’s playground).

This topic is so important and yet it still doesn’t get that much attention from the film industry. The movie Doubt (2008) comes to mind, which talked about this, but it had another focus: did the priest molest the boy or not? We’ll never know. In Spotlight, however, we’re talking about proven cases, with priests being relocated from parishes and secret settlements being made by the Church so that the stories wouldn’t leak to the press.

The entire cast is excellent, but Mark Ruffalo really shines as a passionate reporter, a little different from the others, and with a heavy accent from Boston.

Directed by Tom McCarthy, Spotlight is one of those movies that remind us how important serious journalism is, especially in our age when anyone can be a journalist for five minutes, recording everything with their cellphones. Hopefully, this kind of investigative journalism will continue to exist, regardless of what happens with social media.

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