Hair brushed forward, loping from courthouse to record hall to lawyer's office, Ruffalo's Rezendes is the bloodhound of the Spotlight team.
As it turns out (no spoiler here), Sweeney rules in the Globe's favor, which helps the Spotlight team push their investigation forward.
(While the "Spotlight" team at the Boston Globe is rightly getting its moment of glory, praise is also due to Berry, whose pioneering work on the subject, a decade earlier, was done with far less institutional support).
Spotlight examines in detail the journalistic investigation by the Boston Globe's Spotlight team into accusations of child abuse by scores of Roman Catholic priests and the subsequent cover-up by the church hierarchy, including Boston's archbishop, Cardinal Law.
Coverage remained scatted and disjointed until the Boston Globe's Spotlight Team pulled together the threads around one case that epitomized the pattern and practice of the nationwide and worldwide scandal in the Catholic church.
Spotlight is a movie of clarity and force: the true story of the Boston Globe's "Spotlight" team and its 2002 campaign to investigate a church cover-up of child abuse by Catholic priests.
In Boston, I sat in a conference room with Robinson, now an editor-at-large; Pfeiffer, a columnist and reporter, back at the Globe after seven years at WBUR, the Boston NPR station; and Rezendes, who is still on the Spotlight team.
There are smoking-gun documents proving that church high-ups knew all about the problem and covered it up, Mitch says, but these documents are legally sealed and the Spotlight team must find a way of putting them on the record.
The BBC has consistently defended the integrity of the programme and also rejected calls on Friday from the Sinn Féin deputy leader, Mary Lou McDonald, that the Spotlight team pass on the name of an informant who made the claims about Adams to the Garda.
Set mainly in 2001, the movie unfolds the work done by a quartet of reporters at the Boston Globe (called the Spotlight team) who revealed that many local priests had been sexually preying on minors, that the church had been doing its best to cover up their crimes, and that the local government was also complicit in that cover-up.
The film's title stems from the name of the Globe's "Spotlight Team", which was rewarded with the Pulitzer for its "courageous, comprehensive coverage of sexual abuse by priests, an effort that pierced secrecy; stirred local, national and international reaction; and produced changes in the Roman Catholic Church".
