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    ‘Conclave’ Review: Serpents and Doves Amok in the Vatican

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    This film, based on Robert Harris’s 2016 thriller of the same title, centers on a British cardinal (a sensational Ralph Fiennes), and a campaign for a new pope.There are no Kamala Harris or Donald Trump bumper stickers embellishing the vans that occasionally zip through “Conclave.” The current presidential race is the far greater, more consequential nail-biter, yet there’s still much riding on the contest in this sly, sleek election potboiler about the selection of a new Catholic pope. With pomp and circumstance, miles of scarlet cloth and first-rate scene-stealers, the movie snakes through the marbled corridors of Vatican City, pauses in bedchambers as cold as mausoleums and tunnels into the deepest secrets of the human heart. It’s quite the journey, and as unpersuasive as it is entertaining.Vatican stories are Hollywood catnip; see, or maybe don’t, the Dan Brown adaptations (“The Da Vinci Code,” etc.) featuring a worried-looking Tom Hanks racing through conspiratorial thickets. It’s easy to see the attractions of the minuscule city-state, beyond the untold masterpieces crowding it. The movies love stories about shadowy — to outsiders, at any rate — patriarchal, deeply hierarchical, unimaginably wealthy organizations with strict codes of conduct and tremendous power. That may sound a lot like a thumbnail portrait of the Mafia, but it also describes Hollywood. And what the movies especially love are lightly cynical, self-flattering and finally myth-stoking stories that, like this one, evoke the industry itself.“Conclave,” based on Robert Harris’s 2016 Vatican intrigue of the same title, centers on a British cardinal, Lawrence (a sensational Ralph Fiennes). A cleric of uncertain faith if unwavering convictions about everything else, Lawrence has droopingly sad eyes and refined sensitivities, and serves as the dean of the College of Cardinals, the group charged with selecting the pope, who’s just died. Lawrence is on the move when the story opens, hurrying through dark streets and into a brisk drama filled with whispering, scurrying men, one of whom who will be anointed as the new earthly head of the Catholic Church. There are women, too, though mostly there’s Isabella Rossellini, giving great side-eye as Sister Agnes.The cardinals keep whispering and scurrying as the story quickly revs up. Lawrence has been enduring a personal crisis — Harris calls it “some kind of spiritual insomnia” — and had asked the pope (Bruno Novelli) if he could leave Rome for a religious retreat. The pope denied him, telling Lawrence that while some are chosen to be shepherds, others need to manage the farm. With the pope dead, the reluctant Lawrence steps up and begins managing, a duty that involves herding scores of cardinals through the intricacies of the conclave, Latin for a room that can be locked. First, everyone needs to be sequestered until the announcement of “Habemus papam” (“We have a pope”), but until then, it’s every cardinal for himself.The story coalesces around the lead candidates, a nicely balanced group of sincere, stealthy and smooth operators who soon circle Lawrence, their silver tongues wagging and hands wringing as they make their moves. The director Edward Berger and his team (the casting directors very much included) have stuffed the movie with a Daumier-esque collection of smooth and bearded, guarded and open faces. The juicy main cast includes Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati and a wonderful Sergio Castellitto, who plays a wolfish smiler who fulminates about the church’s liberal faction and yearns for the days of Latin Masses. The story could have used more of him and much more of his ominous rage.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘La Chimera’ Review: A Treasure Trove

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      In her latest dreamy movie, the Italian director Alice Rohrwacher follows a tomb raider, played by Josh O’Connor, who’s pining for a lost love.Like the yellow brick road, the bright red thread in “La Chimera” winds through a world that is both dreamy and touched by magic. The thread has begun unraveling from a long knit dress worn by a woman beloved by the movie’s hero. It trails across the ground, flutters in the air and beguiles you, just like this film. And, like all loose threads — in fraying fabric and in certain stories — this slender cord tempts you to pull it, urging you to see what happens next.“La Chimera” is the latest from Alice Rohrwacher, a delightfully singular Italian writer-director who, with just a handful of feature-length movies — the charming, low-key heartbreaker “Happy as Lazzaro” among them — has become one of the must-see filmmakers on the international circuit. Rohrwacher, who grew up in central Italy, makes movies that resist facile categorization and concise synopsis. They’re approachable and engaging, and while she’s working within the recognizable parameters of the classic art film — her stories are elliptical, her authorship unambiguous — there’s nothing programmatic about her work. More

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      ‘Marcel the Shell With Shoes On’ Review: Bigger Isn’t Better

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      The one-inch-high shell voiced by Jenny Slate gets a feature-length vehicle, but the transition from YouTube fame is only partly successful.When I was a kid, my sister and I had shelves filled with carefully arranged miniatures, ceramic animals and the tiny, delicate like. I never thought much about these displays, though now I see that collecting and ordering these diminutive emblems of the world is a way children express agency and control as they enter it. It’s no wonder that miniatures seem so charming: They’re time machines. The minuscule gives us access to “the enlarging gaze of the child,” as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard puts it in his book “The Poetics of Space.”This partly explains the tug of “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On,” about a teeny-tiny creature in a great, big world. He’s a curious fellow, as in inquisitive, but also simply peculiar. For starters, he’s a shell. Not a land snail or one of the sea creatures whose hard protective layer can be found washed up on shores. Marcel is inexplicably alive, even if, from the looks of him, he’s little more than a walking, talking empty carapace, a whatsit about an inch big with one googly eye, two shoes and an animated mouth that’s a font for a high-pitched, babyish voice.That adenoidal falsetto — courtesy of the comic performer Jenny Slate — is a lot. And it could easily have been a deal-breaker. Marcel is very talkative in the way that, at its most sweet and appealing, recalls the sincere burbling of children sharing every single little thing racing through their fired-up minds. At its least attractive, you may grimly flash on the last gasbag you were stuck next to while waiting on some interminable line. It took me time to warm to the voice, admittedly. In part that’s because you can hear all the calculation shaping Marcel’s stream, the coyness and practiced comedy of its ebb and flow, though mostly flow.It’s fine and sometimes productive to see the labor in a performance, but not here. That’s because while “Marcel the Shell” captivates you with its mix of real objects and animation, its nubby textures and huge thumbtacks, for it to work you need to forget about Slate and just go with the lightly surrealistic silliness. It helps, in other words, to fall in love with Marcel. He’s the protagonist, so there’s no escaping him. But caring for him is crucial because, once he’s shown you around and you’ve met his grandmother — another shell voiced by the invaluable Isabella Rossellini — there is not all that much going on, even if quite a bit happens.Marcel was birthed in 2010 in a three-minute-plus short. Created by Slate and Dean Fleischer Camp, who posted it to YouTube, the short introduced Marcel with small strokes, a shoestring budget and rudimentary but effective stop-motion animation. Of indeterminate origin, Marcel lives in a big house, sleeps on bread and drags around a ball of lint with a human hair. “My one regret in life,” he said then, “is that I’ll never have a dog.” With its artful naïveté and a gentle undertow of melancholia, the short racked up millions of views, and what Marcel soon did have was fame, more shorts, a book and now this feature-length vehicle.“Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” builds on its predecessors to intermittently productive effect. Once again, Marcel is pulling on lint, making a bed of bread and living in a human house, a wee soul in a land of giants. And as he did before, Marcel is talking to, though often at, a guy. This man has a name, Dean (affably voiced by Camp), and a back story. When the movie opens, he is living in Marcel’s house, which has been converted into an Airbnb with disastrous consequences that give the tale shape and sentimentality. He’s also making a documentary about his unusual roommate that he soon posts to, yes, YouTube.Brands are part of Marcel-land, which is a letdown, as is the part of the story which turns on that quintessentially American chronicle of identity, being and becoming: celebrity. Dean’s portrait racks up views, makes Marcel famous and stirs up trouble; enter Lesley Stahl and gawkers wielding selfie sticks. Some of this is funny, if overly familiar, but the self-reflexiveness of the entire enterprise only breaks the spell that Slate and Camp work hard to maintain — one which Rossellini effortlessly keeps intact with intelligence, beautifully controlled phrasing and a soft, melodious warmth that feels like a tender caress.Marcel the Shell With Shoes OnRated PG for some itty-bitty peril and a death. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More