Conclave (2024)

Director: Edward Berger

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Having been waylaid by the Oklahoma Flu for the better part of a month, I’m sad to admit that I’ve missed most (read: all but Dune: Part Two (2023)) of the best picture contenders for this year. Luckily, Peacock had me covered and only jammed two minutes of commercials into my eyes at the top.

Did I Like It: I’ve found myself, and really only since my recent viewing of The Exorcist (1973), strangely admiring of the Catholic clergy. I mean, I haven’t gone completely insane. I’m not going to take an entirely new theological viewpoint, and I could really spend the rest of the review talking about all of the bad things that the Catholic church has perpetrated through their myopia. But the best among them seem intellectually curious and ultimately confront doubt with some regularity.

On that front, I immensely enjoyed the film. The deep dive into papal politics kept me rapt with the same level of interest of any political drama. My sympathies naturally went with the more liberal cardinals, and that’s only partially because Stanley Tucci can’t avoid being likable*, even when he’s engaging in some underhanded machinations.

My only real reservation about the film lies with the third act. There’s a twist, I suppose, in just who becomes Pope at the end of the titular conclave. I won’t spoil it for you, but some might clutch their pearls at the turn. The turn itself isn’t my problem, though. It’s that the twist doesn’t seem to come from anything else that happens in the film. It almost feels like the ending of some other film about gender politics in the Vatican found itself grafted onto this film. I far more enjoyed the road to that twist than the twist itself.

*Truly, they had to pit the man against Tom Hanks to make him anything less than likable in The Terminal (2004).

The Terminal (2004)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci, Chi McBride

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. One of those movies I saw during a summer in Fort Worth where I saw everything, mainly because what else does one do in Fort Worth*.

Did I Like It: I seem to remember in my recent review of 1941 (1979) that I wonder what Spielberg’s career might have become if he his first comedy had been either funny or a hit. It took him the better part of twenty years to come back around to it, but he found the right combination to try again. Sure, one might argue that Always (1989) and Catch Me If You Can (2002)** are comedies, but neither is played largely for laughs.

Harnessing the pure charm which made Frank Capra’s films work, Spielberg finds the right tone. And by that pure charm, I mean having Jimmy Stewart in the film is that right combination. Given that Stewart died in 1997, putting Tom Hanks to work got the same effect done.

That all sounds like I might be denigrating the movie with some faint praise, but Spielberg utilizes some real craft to make such a gentle film feel like it is effortless. Coordinating the large set—what? airports weren’t wild about film companies shooting in their international terminals a couple years after 9/11?—to make it always seem interesting and almost never forces me to focus on just how much a multi-story Borders Bookstore ages the whole thing is something more people should be analyzing to death.

*This doesn’t even try to cover all the other summers where I committed to see anything and everything that came out. Maybe there just isn’t anything to do in Texas or Oklahoma.

**Looking over the filmography Spielberg made both Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and Minority Report (2002) in the same year as each of those examples. The man may not be human.

The Witches (2020)

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Stanley Tucci, Chris Rock

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Oddly enough, had 2020 turned out like some kind of normal year, I probably would not have felt much of an impetus to watch it, but as I apparently have already paid for the movie with my HBO subscription, then I might as well take the plunge.

Did I Like It: So let us begin with the headline. The new remake of The Witches is not the earworm the original adaptation of the film became. It will likely be forgotten pretty quickly as everyone associated with the film has done better work before and will likely to better work in the future.

And that’s not the worst thing in the world.

I actually applaud the film for not trying to re-create the “girl trapped in a painting” scene featured in both the book and the original film. It’s the most memorable part of that previous movie, and any attempt to recreate it is a fool’s errand. When the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children displays a tableau with child statues in the hotel, I did wonder if there were actual kids trapped in those figures, though.

Changing the setting to the American south of the 1960s is a dollop of inspiration, adding a layer of more banal—and unsettlingly real—evil to the proceedings. It would have been nice for that subtext to have been brought to the surface just a bit more, but keeping the setting in England and Norway would have been simply more of the same.

This new film also tries to correct for past mistakes, by (spoiler alert) keeping the hero (Jahzir Kadeem Bruno as a child and new mouse, Chris Rock as his older self) a mouse at the end of the story. Sadly, this film can’t quite pull the trigger on the bittersweet quality of Roald Dahl’s work. In the book, it’s clear our hero will only live for a few more years, to say nothing of the realization that poor Bruno Jenkins (Codie-Lei Eastick) was probably killed by his mousephobic parents. Here, it looks like our hero may live far longer than any other mouse, and Bruno gets to join him and Grandma (Spencer) in their witch-hunting adventures. Perhaps the truly downer endings in children’s literature will never find their way out of the pages of books. Only the bookish kids can be trusted with the reality that sometimes bad things happen.

The rest of the movie is, unfortunately, a litany of disappointments. 

I’m as certain as I can be without a confession to this effect, but it sounded not only like Alan Silvestri phones his score in, but that the entirety of his orchestrations were culled from deleted tracks he wrote for any number of Avengers movies.

It’s always nice to see—or at least hear—Kristen Chenoweth in a film. And yet, her role as another human transformed into a mouse before the events of the film feels too forced in before it turns out she isn’t going to be given anything to do. A girl-mouse is a fine enough idea—why not make the hero female? Only boys can plaintively wail “Grandma!” and do the legwork of getting the mouse-maker formula into the witches’ soup?