Conclave is drop-dead brilliant — a bull’s-eye master class in audience-friendly mise-en-scene, and a cinematic page-turner like very few films over the decades have managed to be. We all saw it last evening at the Herzog (6 pm), and holy effing moley!
All hail director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front), a gifted helmer who’s made a supreme Best Picture contender, as well as the great Ralph Fiennes, whose lead performance as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence is absolutely assured of being a heavily favored Best Actor contender.
Not to mention the fabled Isabella Rossellini, whose performance as the all-knowing and unyielding Sister Agnes easily puts her into the Best Supporting Actress conversation. And there can be no bypassing Stanley Tucci‘s lucid, spot-on performance as Cardinal Bellini in the supporting actor category.
With Conclave, Berger has made a film as complex, riveting, satisfyingly adult, immaculately polished, solemnly spiritual and psychologically gripping as a film of this sort — a procedural institutional thriller — can be.
This Focus Features release (11.1) is obviously a Best Picture nominee — a knockout for intelligent audiences of all stripes and persuasions. Even the younger popcorn lowlifes will appreciate the persistent sheen of quality.
The irony is that Conclave is at heart and itself a popcorn movie, albeit a very high-end one. Why have so few 21st Century films been as good as this? As masterful and assured in the delivery of pure cinematic pleasure?
Believe it or not, a fellow journalist told me last night that a couple of fellows (possibly members of the Nickel Boys team?) were saying after the 6 pm Conclave screening that it’s a respectable but flawed half-and-halfer, possibly because it’s “too white.”
Whoa whoa whoa…too effing white?? This, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is the essence of woke derangement syndrome. On top of which Conclave features a very prominent black character (Lucian Msamati‘s Cardinal Adeyemi, plus there’s another woke-as-fuck third-act plot element that I can’t mention.
