Investigative journalism, but not as we know it – not from the movies, anyway, where the profession and its practitioners tend to fall into a few well-defined categories, often toppling over into cliché: the dishevelled hack who eventually rises heroically to the occasion (Russell Crowe in the Hollywood version of STATE OF PLAY a recent example); the workaholic corner-cutter determined to get The Big Story out onto the streets, come what may (Michael Keaton in THE PAPER) and the cynical yet lovable bunch of rogues exploiting society’s miscreants (every version of THE FRONT PAGE).

SPOTLIGHT deliberately steers clear of any romanticism in its recreation of the real-life expose in 2002 by the Boston Globe of widespread child abuse by Catholic priests, which was happening years before that, but barely made it into the newspapers due to fear of the Church and its powerful local hierarchy (which cited “Sick Leave” as an official way of suspending and then transferring the many transgressors in Massachusetts).

Following the lead set by both ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN – helped by William Goldman’s exemplary script – and David Fincher’s ZODIAC, Tom McCarthy and co-writer Josh Singer uncover the scandal by methodically stripping away sensationalism to reveal the nuts and bolts, the filing cabinets and dull offices of the investigative “Spotlight” team after which the movie is named and who doggedly pursue the story to its conclusion. Though less familiar than the Watergate saga, SPOTLIGHT also succeeds by building in elements of a thriller whose ending is already known.

… dogged editor Marty Baron insists the Spotlight team go after “the system” …

While there’s just as much cumulative star power in SPOTLIGHT as in the casting of Redford and Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, here the charisma of Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo is played down to be subservient to both the narrative and the new editor of the Globe Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber, impressively dour). Baron, against the misgivings of the section editor Ben Bradlee Jnr – portrayed by John Slattery as being easier-going than his more famous father on the Washington Post – is quietly insistent that an apparently isolated incident of child abuse by a priest, hushed up by the church and almost buried in the columns of the Globe, should be followed up.

The Spotlight team stop what they’re doing and set off into the streets, churches and courthouses of Boston as they start compiling the evidence of sexual abuse, helped by previous whistleblowers (flaky and possibly unreliable) and the obsessive lawyer Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci) who like “Deep Throat” before him in Bob Woodward’s investigations, seems as keen to hinder and protect himself as he is to help by revealing what he knows to Mike Rezendes (Ruffalo). Also standing in the team’s way are the sleek representatives of the Church led by bland Archbishop Law (Len Cariou); not to mention the team’s ambivalence about their own Catholic faith.

As the door-to-door enquiries and unsealing of court records gradually reveal the horrific scale of the abuse, the investigation is stopped in its tracks by 9/11 – which does however usefully give the story its third act when the code of “omerta” is finally breached: again prompted by the dogged editor Marty Baron, who insists the Spotlight team go after “the system” rather than individual abusers.

Prior to the full story hitting the streets in early 2002 (in classic fashion with the presses rolling, the fleet of vans roaring out of the printers and copies of the Globe landing on unsuspecting doorsteps) Mike Rezendes stops by a church to hear the choir perform Silent Night in a blaze of Christmas colour, in stark contrast to the beiges and wintry greys of the rest of the film. Though the rot at the heart of the Boston diocese has been exposed, a list of cities in North America and the rest of the world where abuse has since been discovered is put up on captions at the end: a grim reminder of SPOTLIGHT’S topicality, despite its carefully distanced presentation as a period piece.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfm_wJFerfA