“Spotlight” had its fair share of burdens to overcome: It deals with the Catholic church’s sex abuse scandal, which has already been the subject of several powerful documentaries (including “Deliver Us from Evil” and “Mea Maxima Culpa”), and it’s director Tom McCarthy’s first film since the catastrophic Adam Sandler vehicle “The Cobbler.”
Neither winds up weighing down this extraordinary drama: While the script (written by McCarthy and Josh Singer, “The Fifth Estate”) certainly doesn’t shy away from the horrors that priests visited upon their young victims — and the institutional conspiracies that kept these predators from ever facing criminal justice — the film focuses on the dogged sleuthing by reporters and editors at the Boston Globe that broke the story.