Film Review: Spotlight (2015)

"If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one."

That line, spoken by Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), a lawyer representing victims of sexual abuse, cuts to the heart of Tom McCarthy's Spotlight, a calm and concise celebration of calm and concise journalism. In recreating the story of how Spotlight, an autonomous investigative unit within the Boston Globe, reported on the cover-up which allowed Catholic priests to sexually abuse thousands of children over several decades, McCarthy's film is as much a portrait of a city in thrall to the Church as it is a dramatisation of the investigation itself. Like Alan Pakula's All The President's Men, Spotlight is a story of reporters trying to break a story that everyone else already seems to know about, and facing opposition from every strata of Boston society in the process.

Film Review: A Most Wanted Man (2014)

John le Carré's fiction is marked by a key contrast between his methodical plotting and the sweaty desperation of his characters. The spies that populate his novels are often middle-managers trying to achieve a small victory in a conflict in which they no longer believe, and who sacrifice their chance to be a whole person in the pursuit of a greater good. They live only half a life by agreeing to look through the windows of people living their own. One of the reasons that Martin Ritt's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold remains the definitive feature film adaptation of le Carré's work is that it manages to create an air of tragic inevitability, a sense that there are forces at work that will crush the characters no matter what they do, while also imbuing its characters with a faint yet potent belief that maybe they'll be the ones to escape a situation that has already claimed so many lives.

Film Review: To The Wonder (2012)

Considering that his last three films were an elliptical war epic, a retelling of one of the founding stories of America and a millennia-spanning chronicle of the warring halves of the human soul, it's hard not to view Terrence Malick's latest film (his sixth in a career moving comfortably into its fifth decade) as a little slight be comparison. After all, how can the problems of two people amount to more than a hill of beans when placed against the stunning grandeur of the infinite?