One of the most irritating tropes of the "based on a true story" genre (and it pretty much is its own genre) is the use of text cards at the end, after the audio-visual movie itself has finished. Conventionally they're used to provide a bit more context to wider events or fill you in on what happened to the characters after whatever life-changing event you've just seen, but recently it's become a screen-writing short-cut that allows the film to avoid shooting complex climax scenes. Conventional Oscar hungry films like The Imitation Game and Suffragette showed this particularly horribly, with their stories' third act reduced a couple of lines of text (who goes to see Cumberbatch as Turing not to see him bite the apple). But Spotlight is a nice antidote to all this, using the cards as an essential part of the film, serving as an impactful epilogue that operates as a cathartic cap to the main narrative. I won't spoil how it's used, but rest assured this "reveal" could only be told in this way. It's a minor detail, but goes to show how secretly astute McCarthy's direction is, and how complete a film he's made. Spotlight is in US cinemas now and in the UK from 29th January 2016.
