Deborah Ross

Doing the wrong thing

Deborah Ross wanted the film to give it to the church with both barrels but instead director Tom McCarthy chooses to keep a respectful distance

issue 30 January 2016

Like The Revenant and The Big Short, Spotlight is yet another Oscar contender ‘based on true events’ — although it has now been suggested that The Revenant was 99.7 per cent made up. (Does this matter? Only, I suppose, in the sense that you should know what you’re watching.) But we’re on firm ground with Spotlight, where the events — the Boston Globe’s uncovering of systemic child abuse by Catholic priests in Massachusetts — are a matter of record, although how you make a film about something so awful, I don’t know.

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