Conclave

Edward Berger's Conclave opened in 2024 and won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (Peter Straughan, adapting Robert Harris's 2016 novel) and the BAFTA for Best Film. The film consolidated Berger's English-language Hollywood reputation after his German-language Oscar success with All Quiet on the Western Front two years earlier, and gave Ralph Fiennes one of his most acclaimed lead roles in over a decade.

When the Pope dies suddenly, Cardinal Lawrence (Fiennes), the Dean of the College of Cardinals, convenes the conclave (the secretive papal-election process held inside the Sistine Chapel) among the candidates expected to succeed. Stanley Tucci plays the American liberal cardinal Bellini; John Lithgow plays the Canadian conservative cardinal Tremblay; Isabella Rossellini plays Sister Agnes, the senior nun who supervises the cardinals' domestic logistics. As the multi-day balloting proceeds, each candidate's hidden conflicts surface, and Lawrence's investigative role becomes increasingly central.

The film operates as a procedural-thriller about institutional politics rather than as a religious-doctrinal drama. Stéphane Fontaine's photography of the Sistine Chapel interiors and the Casa Santa Marta dormitory (the latter shot at Cinecittà rather than the Vatican) produced one of the most distinctive recent religious-institutional period registers. The closing election sequence is among the most carefully built procedural climaxes of recent Hollywood-prestige cinema; Fiennes's central performance, withholding and finally clear-eyed, is one of the most quietly distinguished of his career.