Conclave (2024)
2 stars / 5
Current events have made this movie “relevant” again, so here we go. Tl;dr, It's a decent movie in and of itself: a talky actors-acting movie perfect for Oscar season. But the end is so gobsmackingly bonkers that it demolishes everything that's gone before.
The trailer is carefully cut to make it look like another DaVinci Code-style story, with a conspiracy and bombs and whatnot, but it's the furthest thing from an action-packed conspiracy film. It's literally about the internecine personality clashes of a half-dozen cardinals, each of whom believes (some quite genuinely) that they have the right organizational vision, and in some cases maybe even a divine calling, to lead the Catholic Church. There's a lot of subtext regarding faith and why it's important, and how duty and faith always wrestle against suspicion and uncertainty, and how that's important. But then there's a ludicrous woke swerve at the end. And that last-minute woke swerve is, most frustratingly, completely unnecessary. The movie would have been great without it.
So It depends on what you're willing to put up with. If you happen to be Catholic, you might find interesting and thought-provoking moments in much the same way I do when I watch something like Under the Banner of Heaven: people outside a faith tradition trying to grapple with concepts as they see them from outside. I suspect Catholic viewers will find some avatars of various factions within Catholicism among the vying cardinals. And as stated, most of the movie is good, by virtue of being well acted. It's Fiennes and Lithgow and Tucci and on and on. The actors involved are all totally on point. There's just a big dumb twist at the end that doesn't need to be there, but which I can see being put there by those same outside-the-faith filmmakers trying to make sense of the faith without any substantive inner understanding of it. Your mileage will definitely vary.
2 stars of 5: I can’t remember the last time I saw a film this good collapse this hard right at the end.