Ralph Fiennes in Conclave
CONCLAVE
In director Edward Berger's Conclave, both the narrative and the principal characters are hiding secrets that shouldn't be spoiled to those who haven't seen the movie and didn't read novelist Robert Harris' 2016 source material. But one secret about the film absolutely can, and should, be revealed in advance: This thing is an almost ridiculous amount of fun.
It's also an example of a specific type of fun – the juicy big-screen potboiler – that has gone sadly missing in recent years. A few decades ago, such entertainments were everywhere, and ranged from the artfulness of The Silence of the Lambs to the trashy thrill of Primal Fear to the acceptable-enough diversion of any number of John Grishams. Yet barring occasional, generally stuffy attempts to resurrect the brand, as in Ron Howard's Dan Brown vehicles for Tom Hanks, bestseller adaptations boasting handsome production values, grabby plot twists, and stacked casts have gone decidedly out of fashion. Conclave is here to rectify that. While the process of electing a new Catholic pope may not sound like the stuff of cinematic enthrallment, Berger, screenwriter Peter Straughan, and an unimpeachable ensemble make certain that the proceedings are never weighed down by the requisite moody lighting and grave discussions on serious matters. If anything, the solemnity enhances the movie's giddy kick, because in this take on papal ascendancy, the choosing of a pope isn't far removed from the choosing of a student-body president in Alexander Payne's Election. Be it Rome or Omaha, enjoyably petty machinations and backstabbing rule the day.
As Berger's film opens, the reigning pope has unexpectedly passed, and the British dean Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), despite his current crisis of faith, is obliged to manage the sequestered cardinals there to elect the late pope's successor. More than 100 have shown up for the conclave – one of them the surprise invitee Benitez (Carlos Diehz), a Mexican archbishop recently, secretly appointed cardinal by the deceased pope. And before long, with a two-thirds majority of folded-ballot votes required for papal succession, there are four primary contenders for the sacred position: Bellini (Stanley Tucci), an American with intensely liberal views; Tedesco (Serhio Castellitto), an Italian with staunch traditional views; Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), a Nigerian who's economically progressive yet socially conservative; and Tremblay (John Lithgow), a Canadian whose most salient characteristic is that he really, really wants to be pope. Yet in the wake of his thoughtful, moving barn-burner of an introductory speech, Lawrence finds himself with five (personally unwanted) votes, and Benitez and some 31 others are single-vote recipients, so the process must begin again. And again. And again.
Naturally, I can't gauge Conclave's accuracy in terms of the papal-election process. (No one but those who've participated really can, and they ain't talkin'.) But if you've ever wondered why it has sometimes taken weeks for white smoke to appear from the Sistine Chapel chimney following a pope's demise, it feels as though Berger's film provides an answer, because it appears that getting two-thirds of amassed cardinals to agree on anything is the Catholic equivalent of herding cats. Decency forbids outright canvassing for the position. One after another, however, cardinals approach Lawrence to demean and trash-talk their rivals, and whispering campaigns are evidently part of the package, as voters work in liberal or traditionalist blocs to determine the candidate with the best shot at besting their ideological opponent. Real life, as we're frequently reminded, is just like higher-stakes high school, and it turns out that watching a collection of purportedly austere, middle- to late-aged men in flowing robes behaving like clique-obsessed teenagers is a not-so-guilty pleasure of the highest order.
That's not to say the film is void of genuine feeling. It couldn't be given Ralph Fiennes' thunderously fine portrayal. With almost all of Lawrence's uncertainty and sadness verbally expressed with resigned acceptance – he politely shrugs off the late pope's refusal to allow him a much-desired leave of absence – the oppressive weight of the cardinal's burden is conveyed almost solely in his eyes and bearing. Lawrence's sickness of the soul would be apparent to anyone who took five minutes away from bellyaching about their own concerns and simply acknowledged it, and Fiennes performs melancholic wonders as this man decreed, perhaps doomed, to put the needs of others ahead of his own. Yet Fiennes is too naturally resourceful and witty an actor to make Cardinal Lawrence a mere totem of misery. You sense Lawrence's buried excitement as he begins playing detective, sussing out other cardinals' hints about past dirty deeds and potential scandals ahead. And is there maybe a wary glint in Lawrence's eye when it's suggested that he might make an ideal pope? While narrative intricacies and reversals abound in Conclave, neither the movie nor Fiennes himself are more riveting than when it begins looking like Cardinal Lawrence – as upstanding and moral a protagonist as you could ask for – may be a direct beneficiary of those complications. It's like an Agatha Christie in which Hercule Poirot himself becomes a chief suspect.
As the cinematic equivalent of a bestselling page-turner, Berger's low-key thriller does feature a few failings even on its own agreeably blithe terms. The running metaphor involving the late pope's passion for turtles, although charming, becomes too overtly on-the-nose. And while I was as surprised as anyone (who also hasn't read Robert Harris' novel) by the climactic switcheroo, I was bothered that the mostly satisfying resolution came to pass only through a wild, awfully portentous coincidence involving Vatican City activity taking place just beyond the sequestered walls. We expect a dose of narrative cheating from pulp entertainments, but the cheat near the finale here is especially eyebrow-raising, given that its sole function would seem to be securing an ending designed to enrage as many traditionalists as possible.
That said, Conclave remains an utter blast. I loved Berger's painterly compositions and cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine's gorgeously arresting images. (Joke question: What's black and white and red all over? Joke answer: This movie.) I adored the dichotomy of cardinals taking part in centuries-old tradition right after scrolling their iPhones, vaping, and entering their dwellings through a metal detector. Volker Bertelmann's score, like the Oscar-winning one he composed for Berger's 2022 All Quiet on the Western Front, is effectively bracing. And in a work of topnotch-across-the-board supporting performances, I hold special affection for Isabella Rossellini, who plays the minor role of a largely silent, all-seeing nun with such quiet fervor and sensationally funny side-eye that her every appearance made me grin like one of those psychopaths from the Smile franchise. Not a reaction I expected from a papal-ascendancy drama. But the experience of Conclave is anything but expected.
YOUR MONSTER
Because writer/director Caroline Lindy's Your Monster is essentially a dark-hued, rom-com variant on Beauty & the Beast, I know this shouldn't be my chief takeaway from the movie, and it's no doubt a minority viewpoint based on personal experience. But seriously: Why oh why do movies almost never get theatre right?
The central plot concerns Laura Franco (Melissa Barrera), a 30-ish stage wannabe in New York whose dickhead boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan) broke up with her after the young woman was diagnosed with cancer. Recovering in her absent mother's brownstone, and in heightened sitcom fashion, Laura sobs and sobs – ordering tissues in bulk from Amazon because she's apparently too depressed to hit a CVS – and only comes out of her funk when she discovers that the imagined childhood monster from her closet is now her flesh-and-blood roommate (Tommy Dewey). As in B&tB, Laura initially fears Monster, and he initially growls at her and demands that she leave, and after much Odd Couple bantering, they eventually become romantically entwined. But in the midst of this, Laura auditions for, and is cast in, the musical that she and Jacob were workshopping with hopes of Broadway success. And it was here that my enjoyment of the early rom-com trappings came to an end, because not only does the movie's tone become hopelessly confused, but Lindy suggests that she has no earthly idea about the show-biz subject she chose to tackle.
When Laura shows up for the audition, Jacob's producing team doesn't know who she is, even though – considering she spent years playing the musical's lead in one workshop after another – at least a few of them would certainly have seen her in a prior incarnation of the show. The backdrop for this Broadway endeavor looks like a tacky leftover from a junior-high production. The music and lyrics we hear are somehow even more mundane. An opening-night screaming match takes place during intermission directly behind the curtain, as if it wouldn't be heard by patrons over the minor auditorium din. And, in perhaps my least-favorite cliché in films (and, for that matter, stage musicals) about theatre, the leading lady graciously chooses to step out of the show – On opening night! On Broadway!!! – so her plucky understudy can take her place. Everything about Your Monster's theatrical angle is simply wrong wrong wrong. That may not have been a deal-breaker had so little of the rest of the movie gone right.
While she's been perfectly serviceable in the last two Scream entries, Barrera was also terrific in 2021's Lin-Manuel Miranda adaptation In the Heights, and at first, the performer seems capable of handling both despondent cancer-patient ache and hyper-actively comedic Meg Ryan wailing in her role as Laura. She can't, however, make up for Lindy's weirdly obnoxious tonal vacillations, which keep Laura from ever being truly appealing; even though nearly everyone she encounters is a varying degree of asshole, you don't end up liking Laura very much, either. And excepting the radiant Meghann Fahy as the talent who unknowingly usurps Laura's Broadway-breakout part, Your Monster is filled with one unpleasant figure after another – even Dewey's Monster is too glib, and too hindered by his role's purely functional purpose, to bother caring about. Although the climax does deliver a mild jolt, it feels completely unrelated to the movie's first hour-plus, and so you end up leaving Lindy's feature more annoyed than you might've been at a typically banal romantic comedy. This storybook-fueled oddity may have a Belle, but sadly, it's no ball.
VENOM: THE LAST DANCE
Over the six years since Tom Hardy first played disgraced investigative journalist Eddie Brock and his wisecracking CGI symbiote in Venom, the actor has appeared on-screen precisely twice: as the dementia-ridden titular gangster in 2020's Capone, and as the quietly authoritative motorcycle-posse leader in this past summer's The Bikeriders. I loathe the Venom movies for all sorts of reasons: their juvenile attempts at humor; their cruddy visuals; their mindless comic-book plotting; their PG-13 hindrance regarding conceivably R-rated effects; their determined refusal to give talents such as Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, Woody Harrelson, Naomie Harris, and, here, Juno Temple and Chiwetel Ejiofor anything meaningful or even borderline-interesting to do. Yet while I'm sure those Marvel bucks provided plenty of impetus to simply hang out and wait for the next Venom to begin filming, I may never forgive this series for so thoroughly wasting Hardy's prime 40s, a period in which he could've been giving us another Bronson or Warrior or Locke – anything, really, that would've reconfirmed him as one of our greats. Instead, it's been almost nothing but morose kvetching and sub-Jerry-Lewis slapstick and witless punchlines that could've been delivered by any growly wannabe with a SAG card. Hardy may be laughing all the way to the bank, but I sincerely hope there's a tear or two mixed in, because when thinking about the actor's career since 2018, Heaven knows I feel like crying.
Due to its haphazard plotting and complete lack of stakes beyond the usual The Fate of the World Hangs in the Balance drivel, it's tempting to call writer/director Kelly Marcel's Venom: The Last Dance the worst of the three-picture lot. After all, 2021's Let There Be Carnage at least gave Harrelson and Harris some room to maneuver, however minimally. But the first Venom set such a stunningly low bar that anything deviating from its remedial origin-story format was bound to be an improvement. So let's just call Marcel's trilogy-ender the exact mid-point between the two, meaning it falls somewhere between generically bad and atrocious. The Hardy-v.-Hardy bickering is still tiresome (and sometimes unintelligible); the action nonsense is amped up to 11; Andy Serkis shows up as the next Sony/Marvel über-nemesis who, at this point, is nearly all forehead; and stupidity continues to be the series' defining motif. (Interplanetary monsters are only alerted to Venom's presence when he's all symbiote and no Eddie, so of course Venom gets the pair in hot water via a nakedly alien pas de deux with Peggy Lu's Mrs. Chen, who of course is staying at the same luxury hotel Eddie randomly stumbles into.) But Temple pops her eyes agreeably, and Rhys Ifans lightens the load as an Area 51-obsessed hippie, and even though I accidentally/on-purpose missed whatever mid-credits scenes The Last Dance may have provided, at least the Venom series is all over now, right?
Ummm … right? Hello?! It worries me that you're not answering.
