Spotlight: New film puts spotlight on Boston’s pedophile priests

“Spotlight,” starring Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo as reporters working on The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of pedophile Roman Catholic priests, deals with just a fraction of sexual predation in the church, its director says.

Reports of sexual misconduct by the late British entertainer Jimmy Savile and other high profile cases are an indication of the global scope of the problem, and of failures to deal with it, Tom McCarthy said before his film’s screening on Thursday at the Venice Film Festival.

“These moments where we know people have done things wrong and we don’t, as a society, we don’t stand up to them, it takes years and years and years and the question is why? Why does it take so long?” McCarthy said in an interview on Wednesday.