My movie review of "Conclave"
I don't want to say that I finally watched "Conclave" in case the Pope kicks the bucket and then I'd like to have an informed opinion about what's going on, but, yeah, I finally watched "Conclave."
From my new movie review in Taki’s Magazine:
Steve Sailer
February 25, 2025Conclave is a (non-action) thriller set inside the Sistine Chapel during the election of a new pope, starring veteran acting luminaries Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow as cardinals conspiring to sit on the throne of Saint Peter while still laboring to appear less ambitious than they really are. It’s the kind of solid mid-budget drama for grown-ups that Hollywood used to make frequently, but it now seems so remarkable that it has a serious shot at winning the Best Picture Oscar.
The movie, which is primarily in English, but also in Italian, Spanish, and Latin, is a straightforward adaptation by German director Edward Berger (Deutschland 83 and the latest All Quiet on the Western Front) of Robert Harris’ 2016 novel. There was an old saying that mid-century Hollywood films were movies about Protestants made by Jews for Catholics. Conclave is a return to the brief era of films such as The Exorcist about Catholics.
A former Fleet Street journalist turned author of well-researched political fiction in the tradition of Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal), Harris has had quite a few of his upper-middlebrow page-turners filmed. Perhaps the most notable was Roman Polanski’s 2010 thriller The Ghost Writer, with Ewan McGregor as a hack hired to compose the memoirs of a former Labour prime minister (Pierce Brosnan), modeled on Harris’ ex-friend Tony Blair, who, Harris asserted, sold out the United Kingdom’s national interest to back George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
Harris is a sort of left-of-center English patriot in the vein of George Orwell, a notorious bigot against Irish Catholics (e.g., the final boss in 1984 is named O’Brien), but he works harder than Orwell to be sympathetic to Catholic politicians like the cardinals (although Blair’s post-office conversion to Catholicism perhaps upset Harris).
Read the whole thing there.
“Hundreds of entertainers jumped at the chance to go to The Vatican to meet The Pope. To be fair most of them thought it was an invite to one of Diddy’s parties.” - ricky gervais.
"It’s the kind of solid mid-budget drama for grown-ups that Hollywood used to make frequently, but it now seems so remarkable that it has a serious shot at winning the Best Picture Oscar."
Google states that Conclave's budget was 20 million.
Anora's budget falls around 6 million.
And the Brutalist's budget is around 13 million.
All three films combined budgets don't even total 40 million, which would be about somewhat less than the marketing budget for a standard Marvel film.
By way of contrast, Chris Columbus's 1990 film Home Alone was made for around 18 million (in 1990 money) and that was considered on the modest to beginning of low end of budgets for Hollywood for the time.
Aside from all three films not having much in the way of major special effects, are the low budgets made possible because at least in the case of Conclave and the Brutalist, uh, the actors aren't paid what they used to be, back around 1990's thru the 2010's?