Spotlight

"There’s something old-fashioned about Tom (The Station Agent) McCarthy’s real-life child abuse drama, and it’s not just the setting: 1990s/2000s Boston. Although – it has to be said – reasonably unappealing as Friday night viewing, it’s a film with integrity, about people trying to hold on to that self-same quality. Like its protagonists, it’s modest, unstarry, and admirably unswerving. It gets the job done."

"A magnificently nerdy process movie — a tour de force of filing-cabinet cinema..."

"A rigorously detailed telling of an important story that never loses sight of the human devastation."

"A more subtle, damning film for implicating the media – as much as the church, the courts, the legal profession and other Boston institutions – in the systematic, wider cultural cover-up it describes."

"For all of its modesty and dedication to process, Spotlight winds up being a startlingly emotional experience..."

"Never hits the heights of passion, but capably and decently tells an important story."

"This might just be the best newspaper film since All the President's Men in 1976."

"This landmark film takes a clear-eyed look at the digital future and honors the one constant that journalism needs to stay alive and relevant: a fighting spirit."

"Its prosaic presentation suggests that the story's full potential, encompassing deep, disturbing and enduring pain on all sides of the issue, has only begun to be touched."

"A grown-up film about serious people that mercifully escapes any awards-grabbing platitudes, this is more thrilling than most action movies."