AVClub: There’s a very famous shot in the 1976 classic All The President’s Men of Woodward and Bernstein seated at a table, paging through stacks of pertinent documents, as the camera slowly pulls back to reveal the full size and scope of the room. It’s the movie in a nutshell: two journalists with their noses to the grindstone, discovering just how far back the conspiracy they’re investigating really reaches. Spotlight, from writer-director Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent, Win Win), never conveys its themes with any such formal elegance; it’s more workmanlike, with a repetitive piano score by Howard Shore that labors a little too hard to underline the nobility of what we’re seeing. But that iconic shot, or one like it, wouldn’t be out of place here, as McCarthy’s film has been built in the same gripping procedural mode as Alan J. Pakula’s, with a comparable interest in the mundane daily duties—the nuts and bolts, the nitty gritty—of honest reporting. Like All The President’s Men, it’s a muckraker movie that celebrates the power of the press by actually showing journalists doing their job, pen and notebook in hand.
Real life stories of how principled individuals stand up against powerful entities and eventually expose large-scale injustices are often cathartic and intriguing, since we know how difficult it is to oppose said entities. If you like Dark Waters for its themes, its basis in true events or its leading man, here are four other films to watch.
Ensemble dramas aren’t the easiest types of movies to film. Too many diverse dynamics between big personalities could go very wrong. But if the cast shares sizzling chemistry, the movie becomes a joyride instead.
Winner of the Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Picture, Spotlight is a very hard film to watch. It’s not hard to watch because it isn’t interesting or compelling, but it’s hard to stomach because it is the true story of how the Boston Globe uncovered the unbelievable scandal of child molestation and cover – up within the local Catholic Archdiocese and cause massive shake-ups within the entire Catholic Church.
