We get it—there is simply too much. So, as in years past, we are giving our editors a last-minute opportunity to plug the things that maybe got away. See all the things you really should have read, watched, or listened to—as well as more of our year in review coverage—here.
Generally speaking, I’m not so into movies that feature the Catholic Church in a starring role. Sure, Spotlight was iconic in a what-is-Rachel-McAdams-wearing way, but between that and Hanya Yanagihara’s searing 2015 novel A Little Life, I was starting to feel a little bit maxed-out on priest abuse as a narrative device (largely because said device rarely centers the lived experiences of survivors of clergy abuse, focusing instead on the fallout for abusive priests when their wrongdoing is brought to light, and the ways the institution itself does or does not bounce back as a result of said wrongdoing. No offense, but who cares? Bring down all the institutions!).
Maybe that’s precisely why I was so drawn to Conclave, Edward Berger’s thriller/mystery about the selection of a new pope. The film, based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris, is littered with priests behaving badly and Isabella Rossellini doing her best to disapprove of absolutely everyone, but as far as we know, none of their various indiscretions involve the harming of minors. (Well, to be fair, there is one subplot involving Nigeria’s Cardinal Adeyemi engaging in an illicit affair with a nun from his home country, but there’s no specific reason to believe said nun was underage at the time.) Mostly, these potential popes’ less-than-good deeds can be boiled down to two words: “vaping” and “gossip,” both things I L-O-V-E!
I was as surprised as the next not-particularly-observant Jew to find myself genuinely enjoying a movie about the Church—especially while watching the relatively progressive Cardinal Bellini (the great Stanley Tucci, who should really be making and eating pasta in Rome, but apparently took a short sojourn toward Vatican City for this role) face off against the reactionary traditionalist Cardinal Tedesco, who basically thinks Islam is the root of all evil (a view that Bellini is quick to rebut, although it’s not clear how many of his colleagues he’s able to convince after the Sistine Chapel is damaged by a suicide bombing). Yet the true voice of reason is ultimately the dark-horse candidate Cardinal Vincent Benitez, archbishop of Kabul, who has, to put it frankly, seen some shit and is not here to indulge his more conservative peers’ terrorist fear-mongering.
I don’t want to spoil the Benitez-related surprise reveal in Conclave, mostly because I really think you should see it, and there’s nothing worse than being left cold by a plot-twist that has the rest of the audience gasping (literally, fair reader, my moviegoing accomplice and I gasped out loud). Suffice it to say that when the white smoke goes up in a plume from the Vatican chimney, it’s Benitez I’m rooting for.
Half the fun of this movie, though, is the fact that it’s basically The Real Housewives of Vatican City. You don’t have to earnestly back a candidate or know too much about the ins and outs of Catholic politics; simply settle back with your movie snacks and let the dulcet tones of Ralph Fiennes’s voice carry you away to a world where a papal conclave can be a genuinely good time. (Or, as my favorite recent tweet reads, “Let’s have a conclave. Lock the doors tight. I wanna have a conclave.”)
