15 Best Films Of 2016 (So Far)

It certainly wasn’t the expected big winner of the Oscars, but it’s hard to deny the brilliance of Spotlight.

The subject matter - institutionalised paedophilia in the Catholic Church - is a difficult one, both in handling its darkness and conveying the scope of the tragedy, but by exploring it through the eyes of the Boston Globe reporters who blew the scandal open in the early 2000s Tom McCarthy strikes it right; we discover the extent of the well-publicised scandal with the characters, seeing the personal effects and the shock at the depravity of it first hand (smartly, the script doesn't divulge what’s actually being claimed until the mid-way point).

Everything is spot on - the slowly-revealing performances, the tight dialogue-heavy script, the unobtrusive, purposeful direction, although its brilliance is perhaps best seen in the final title cards. This biopic trope is normally trotted out to save movies about complex subjects that strive to be commercial from showing the really horrible stuff (The Imitation Game relegated Alan Turing’s death to one line of text), but in Spotlight it’s an emotive cap on the film, detailing all the parishes where abuse had taken place, framing the fully-Boston movie on a global scale.

For more on Spotlight, check out 8 Reasons Why It Deserves To Be An Oscar Favourite.