Hacker Cinema
Conclave
2024 · Film · 120 min
Directed by Edward Berger
After the unexpected death of the Pope, Cardinal Lawrence is tasked with managing the covert and ancient ritual of electing a new one. Sequestered in the Vatican with the Catholic Church’s most powerful leaders until the process is complete, Lawrence finds himself at the center of a conspiracy that could lead to its downfall.
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15 comments on Hacker News
> I watched it twice, which is pretty unheard of for me. I thought the book was fine but not a favourite.
I think it's interesting when a movie can be faithful, and yet hit differently. Conclave was like that for me—I enjoyed the book, but it came across as a political thriller with a Catholic twist. But the movie, by showing all of the uniforms, all of the architecture and art, came across far more significant than just a political thriller. A great cast helped with that, admittedly.
You can only think of 2 notable films since 2022?
* American Fiction
* The Holdovers
* Oppenheimer
* Perfect Days(!)
* Nosferatu
* Conclave
* Challengers
* The Mastermind
I can rattle off more but those seem pretty hard to argue with. All of them are better than EEAAO.
Banshees of Insherin is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. The understatedness is critical to the humor and story; it’s a juxtaposition of boring people in a boring town and the batshit plots that develop.
Other recent greats are maybe Poor Things, Challengers, and Conclave.
You wouldn’t mistake any for Shawshank, but that’s ok, it’s 30 years later. Shawshank is also qualitatively different from great movies in the mid 1960’s, like Dr. Strangelove or The Graduate.
I'm surprised they call out the Conclave as an example of a good movie. It's not a bad movie, but the final twist (I'm not going to spoil it) is way over the top and almost absurdly Hollywood.
Shoutout to the Pope Crave (@ClubConcrave) account on Twitter/X. They somehow went from a fandom account posting yaoi/BL content for the movie Conclave to an actual journalistic outfit who posted the results of the actual conclave before mainstream news outlets did
Slightly related: the movie "Conclave" (2024) is a great and surprising thriller. Critics consensus from RottenTomatoes:
> Carrying off papal pulp with immaculate execution and career-highlight work from Ralph Fiennes, Conclave is a godsend for audiences who crave intelligent entertainment.
[video trailer] https://youtu.be/JX9jasdi3ic?si=sYwqRlK-4hYUnsAa
Great time to watch the movie "Conclave"
I'm not a catholic but I decided to watch the new Conclave movie as well as a Tasting History by Max Miller to learn a little bit about it. Very interesting but I'd love a historical movie on some of the past conclaves when the pope managed a standing army.
Edit: The Max Miller video was about the baby back ribs cooked in proto-bbq sauce made from grapes that was eaten by a conclave.
>Look at it's base price, then lookat their customers. It makes no sense to break it.
You're not thinking the same way the motivated pirates think. Some pirates (especially in Eastern Europe, Asia, etc) rip new releases as fast as possible to illegally re-sell or re-stream for lower prices (or show along with ads for revenue). In this way, the pirates get the revenue instead of the legitimate movie studios.
So pirate groups in combination with illegal streaming websites can be thought of as a black market financial arbitrage. So far, the video sources they used include Blu-Ray rips and streaming Netflix or Amazon Prime Video webrips.
However, the Kaleidescope players could theoretically also be included as rip sources ... if the DRM was broken. The math for profitable arbitrage isn't that ridiculous. E.g. :
- a 4k UHD Blu-Ray is $33.49 : https://www.amazon.com/Conclave-4K-UHD-Edward-Berger/dp/B0DP516WZ3/
- it would take only ~80 of those titles to recoup the cost of $1995 Kaleidescope player + the $7.95 rental fees for 80 downloads. All downloads after that break-even threshold is extra money for the pirates. Another bonus is pirating 4k UHD content that's not available on physical Blu-rays.
But the Kaleidescope DRM isn't broken. Therefore, the $7.95 rental downloads can't be used as a new vector for pirate releases. Of course, Kaleidescape doesn't want this scenario to happen so they're incentivized to continue paying for the DRM licensing protection.
And to recap the specifics I was replying to, it was this: >"If you're going to allow playback on devices in "adversarial" hands (streaming, home physical media playback), it's going to be incredibly difficult to restrict copying."
Kaleidescape is one counterexample to that. So far, they have actually restricted copying with success.
Interesting timing for this movie https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conclave_(film)
the film Conclave did a very good job at showing the politics and conflicts within the catholic church
Great article.
A couple weeks ago, on a flight, I watched the movie Conclave (2024) which is about the process of selecting the Pope, in a modern context. I thought it was surprisingly good, but felt like a warning call for the next papal conclave as it illustrated how the power some of these individuals face can corrupt. Fascinating to think how this process would have played out in 16th Century Italy.
To be fair, the question of whether it’s historically accurate is irrelevant because the film obviously doesn’t depict real events with real cardinals… even to the viewer who knows nothing about who is who in the real-life Catholic hierarchy, the terrorist event that triggers a major plot twist should be a big clue that this is a fictional thriller, not a documentary. Apart from that, the setting is contemporary so history has nothing to do with it.
So it’s a gossipy political thriller where the setting is the Vatican, not the White House or the House of Lords. The question remains: is it a reasonably faithful depiction of the way a real papal conclave operates, in both procedure and the negotiation/clique-forming/decision-making process? Catholic friends of mine who know much more than I do about what goes on in Rome actually have the opposite fear: that it is all too realistic and exposes too much about the power games that go on instead of earnestly seeking the good of the faith, and of the faithful. If that’s the case, then in the long run it can only be good because, as Christ Himself said: “you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)
Edit: to be fair, there are some flashbacks in the film to historical events taking place in Latin America, IIRC these are also fictionalized but yeah, I could imagine someone who knows the history of that particular situation being able to say that it's innacurately depicted; however that's not the key theme of the film's narrative, which is a contemporary papal election. By contrast the film "The Two Popes" does deserve the historically-inaccurate tag, because it depicts a meeting between two real-life people which definitely never happened and is purely the imagination of the playwright who asked himself "what if?" In that case, I do wish that the film would preface itself by making it clear that it is purely a flight of fancy in order to explore ideas around faith, theology and succession because I'm sure a lot of people really do believe that Francis did have private conversations with Benedikt and received his endorsement.
The point of Conclave isn't to demonstrate how the cardinals vote and the pope picking process. It's to analyze and dwell on how people are treated and viewed. What makes you trust and distrust someone who hasn't been entirely honest with you? The ending twist isn't to be edgy it's to bring up a topic that many Catholics need to deal with relative to the trust thesis of the movie.
If anyone hasn’t seen Conclave I really recommend it. It seems so boring, but my girlfriend and I were fascinated the whole movie.