Conclave

There’s a kind of hush in Conclave—not silence, but the coiled, breath-held quiet of ancient ritual dressed in modern cutlery. It hums beneath cassocks and gritted teeth, beneath the Sistine ceiling that feels less like heaven and more like surveillance. This is a thriller measured in eye flickers and murmured allegiance, where every footstep echoes like a gavel against the ribs of God Himself. The film dares to strip theology of majesty and expose its scaffolding—fragile men with trembling hands attempting to steer the eternal. It is not about faith; it’s about the performance of belief, a kind of ecclesiastical LARP in the Vatican's bowels, where politics and power pirouette around a slowly dying candle. Fiennes walks like a man who’s been hollowed out by too many whispered truths. His performance isn’t acting, it’s a slow possession. You watch him dissolve into robes and ritual, until only guilt remains—dense and invisible as incense. His eyes do most of the speaking, which feels apt in a film where words are dangerous currency. But what I loved—what made this film throb with relevance—was how it made the divine feel mundane, and the mundane feel profound. A key in a drawer has the tension of a loaded gun. A hallway becomes a confession. And when secrets slip through cracks, they don’t fall—they metastasize. The final reveal is less twist and more transubstantiation. A quiet heresy buried in cloth and dust. And it asks—not whether men can speak for God—but whether they've just been speaking to themselves, in a cathedral-sized echo chamber.

Entertaining, but also controversial. Based on the fact that the Catholic Bishops warned against it speculative side that may cast doubt in believers' minds. Regardless, it still has a fair amount of intrigue and excellent acting to keep you wondering what will happen. My friend Danny recommended that I see it after the Oscars. Saw on Peacock.

Robbed at the Oscars, this is an intelligent and revealing dramatic look at the process of selecting the next pope. Ralph Fiennes plays a character that had me thinking back to Keyser Soze in Usual Suspects as Conclave has so many twists and turns you absolutely cannot predict what Fiennes character, Cardinal Lawrence, is going to do next. Must watch film.

Interesting script, great acting and cinematography.

US political drama of eternal fight between left, and right utilizing gender politics and transplanting it into religious 2+ hours of cheap quasi intelectual rubbish.

Great acting. Interesting subject matter. Just not something I'd feel the need to watch again.

...EXCELLENT...In Every Category...A WOW...Can Not Even Conceive Of A Hermophodite Pope...THOUGHT PROVOKING...

Saw it on a plane. Loved it. The story, the acting, the cinematography, the underlying themes, the relevance to current events. Everything. Probably merited watching it on a big screen, but I'm glad to have gotten to see it.

The acting was superior. The end vote was given away too early and a very strange ending

Good but not great. Overrated. Interesting, but mostly predictable. The final plot twist is as implausible as the sequence of events needed to get to that point, but everyone seemed typecast for their roles to make it happen. It was almost like a comic book movie, you knew who everyone was when you first saw them. I don't know how accurate it was about cardinal politics, but if it is, what a way to run a church.