Stillwater (Tom McCarthy, 2021). Stillwater is a fascinating hybrid. It begins and ends like a more realistic, sober-minded riff on one of Liam Neeson’s Taken or Taken-adjacent movies, with a Oklahoma roughneck in place of a well-trained oak tree with … Continue reading Then Playing — Stillwater; Platoon; Freebie and the Bean
The comparison to All the President’s Men is irresistible, only because it is so apt. With Spotlight, named after the investigative journalism unit at The Boston Globe, director Tom McCarthy traces the efforts of a team of dedicated reporters examining the pervasive sexual abuse of minors perpetrated by members of the Catholic clergy and the reprehensible cover-up of those crimes by the institutional powers within the Church. Like Alan J. Pakula’s sterling 1976 drama, Spotlight approaches its subject with a commitment to depicting the meticulous toil that goes into building a devastating, revelatory newspaper article of undeniable fact, essentially celebrating the … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Seven
The title of the new film Spotlight refers to a special investigative journalism team at The Boston Globe. Treated as a somewhat separate and fairly autonomous entity within the culture of the venerable newspaper, the reporters in the Spotlight unit take on major stories and dig unimaginably deep into them before a single word is pressed onto newsprint. The film, directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy, depicts this group’s efforts, beginning in 2001, to expose the machinations undertaken by the Catholic Church to harbor child-molesting priests and cover up their own culpability in the scandal, then still dismissed by too many as … Continue reading You know what everything’s about, you had to have a white hot spotlight
Coffee for Two 