Something to watch tonight: Monday 20 November

Spotlight (McCarthy, 2015)

Prime Video sub­scribers (in New Zealand at least) may have noticed that the range and qual­ity of non-Amazon stu­di­os product on the ser­vice has deteri­or­ated recently.

I’ve just spent quite a while trawl­ing through the sub-direct-to-video schlock that makes up most of the site, look­ing for some­thing to recom­mend and I’m doubt­ful I would have had the patience if if wasn’t for sub­scribers like you.

One high­light is the 2015 dual-Oscar win­ner Spotlight, dir­ec­ted by Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent) from a script by him and Josh Singer.

It’s the true story of the invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ism unit at the Boston Globe who took on the entrenched might of the Catholic Church in order to expose the sys­tem­at­ic cover-up of child sexu­al abuse by their priests.

Of course, we know that crimes of that nature were not (and are not) con­fined to one spe­cif­ic dio­cese and the film ends with a long and sober­ing list of glob­al loc­a­tions where Catholic Church abuse has been con­firmed. The pres­ence of my own sub­urb of Silverstream on that list was a rare occa­sion where we don’t cel­eb­rate being recog­nised by Hollywood.

The ensemble cast, includ­ing Liev Schreiber, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams and Stanley Tucci, fires on all cyl­in­ders and the film has a self-possessed nar­rat­ive drive that forces com­par­is­on with news­pa­per clas­sics like All the President’s Men.

Back in January 2016, the pod­cast Rancho Notorious was still pro­du­cing epis­odes for RNZ and we engaged spe­cial guest expert review­er Colin Peacock from RNZ’s Mediawatch pro­gramme to help us with Spotlight. It turns out that Colin had actu­ally vis­ited the Boston Globe on one of his over­seas research trips and met some of the Spotlight team.

Spotlight made my ‘Best of 2016’ list for RNZ and the Academy agreed with me, giv­ing it the Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay awards for that year.

Where to find Spotlight

Aotearoa: Streaming on Prime Video (and Netflix)

Australia: Streaming on Netflix

USA: Streaming on Max and DirectTV

UK: Streaming on Netflix and NowTV (a Sky product)