★★★★★

Spotlight might well be a perfect movie.

Journalism is all but dead in America and probably the world. The constant drive to make a fast buck and turn a quarterly profit has decimated the journalism industry. Local papers no longer have the resources to put crack investigative journalists on a story for up to 2 years before the first print article appears. Because of this stories even more heinous than this story will remain buried.

Forget about your identity theft enabling devices and viral videos on-line. No matter how major you think those stories are they are nothing compared to what quality journalism can reveal when it has both time and resources. All of those viral videos require one thing, someone there with a camera. They cannot reveal institutionalized crime such as multiple decades of priests abusing children behind closed doors and a church actively engaged in covering it up with the help of various public officials and police officers.

Mark Ruffalo does an absolutely amazing job of acting in this film. The supporting cast playing the rest of the team does an equally fine job.

What Spotlight got right

What was truly special about this movie was how they revealed just how deep the cover up went. Not just inside of the church, but inside of the Boston Globe. People had sent evidence in repeatedly over the decades and it ended up getting shelved or having just a few lines in a columnist article instead of getting newsworthy treatment.

Another point Spotlight did a good job of making is that the lunatic fringe are often right. For years the SNAP (Survivors Network Abused by Priests) front man had been viewed by the paper as some armadillo shell for a hat wearing nutter. When he sent an entire box full of evidence, including information about an ex-priest who had been studying sexual abuse by priests as a psychologist for roughly 30 years, it was cast aside and forgotten.

Summary

Spotlight is a movie worth watching over and over again. Sadly, now that MBAs have overrun newspapers and advertisers no longer fund them, we will never see a crime of this magnitude exposed by journalists again. Don’t think it is because no such crimes exist. It is because the watchers no longer have the funding to actually watch and report.

For more movie rental ideas please see list one and list two.