On November 6 2015, ‘Spotlight’ opened in the United States to a limited number of theaters. The rated R drama/thriller follows how the Boston Globe newspaper gained extensive Pulitzer Prize-winning insight into the Catholic Church’s efforts to cover up the massive child molestation cases among Catholic priests. The film included performances from Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo to name a few.

Though I sat in easily one of the worst seats during a prescreening (front row and to the far right), I walked away really enjoying the piece. Critics seem to feel the same. Currently, the film holds a 93 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a 93 percent rating on Metacritic and an 8.1/10 on IMDb.

Director Tom McCarthy certainly has a lot to celebrate. Telling an honest and gripping story in Hollywood is not easy. The entertainment value was undoubtedly there; the priest pedophilia scandals are grotesque and intriguing at the very least. But when it came to portraying the truth on screen McCarthy knew he had a big order to fill.

In an interview with Variety.com, the director recalls how people from different backgrounds in his life were pulling for opposing portrayals of the story. In fact, McCarthy was raised Irish Catholic. When film producers Blye Faust and Nicole Rocklin approached him with the idea, he sat down with his father first to discuss the job. McCarthy explained in his Variety interview,

“[My father is] very strong Catholic. And I told him: ‘As soon as they announce it in the papers, you and mom are going to hear about it.’ And sure enough calls started coming from all their friends saying, ‘Why is he doing this?’ ‘Can’t we move on?’”

And then there came the influence from the real life journalists whom the film revolves around. Later along in his Variety interview McCarthy stated:

“Ultimately [the journalists] are the heroes of the story, and I think we all owe them a debt of gratitude for the work they did. That said, they become our subjects too, so there is always that line that at one point we are going to have to tell the story, and maybe it won’t be all favorable to some degree.”

I thought McCarthy, co-writer Josh Singer and the cast did an excellent job at sustaining that objective angle throughout. As NPR.org describes the movie,

“In ‘Spotlight,’ there’s no central protagonist, only reporters pulling out threads and phoning one another breathlessly as the scale of the cover-up becomes visible [. . . ] The movie makes the best case for the necessity of investigative journalism than any film since ‘All the President’s Men.’”

Nevertheless, not everyone has thought the same. A small number of people at the screening I attended believed the film over glorified journalists and/or over generalized Catholic priests in a negative light. Though I did not feel the same, I highly encourage everyone to watch McCarthy’s film and decide for themselves how well the movie handling nonfictional storytelling.