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Comedies of Errors
Anora Instantly one of the great films about the gap between image and reality; sometimes seemingly erased, or glossed over, through optical illusions yet ultimately, and sometimes painfully, unbridgeable. To that end, it's Vertigo for the Instagram age, but vastly funnier; this century, only Mistress America comes as close to vintage '30s/early '40s screwball form. Indeed, Anora is fully hilarious –– until it's not. Then, finally, it's as heartbreaking and poignant as movies get.
Heretic A World Religions seminar thought-experiment as choose-your-own-adventure horror story. The first hour or so is exceptionally tense, funny, and engaging. But from there it over-commits both conceptually and generically, devolving into a relatively ho-hum horror movie, worth sticking with mainly for Hugh Grant's best and weirdest work since Paddington 2. Most haunted houses are scarier (in theory) before you actually step inside, although the good ones can be an awful lot of fun. In Heretic, most of the fun drains out soon after the visitors/protagonists choose their door to walk through and the film tips its hand, so intriguingly well played up to that point. Or, to mix in yet another muddled metaphor, the emperor hasn't any clothes...though maybe that is the point here?
Urbi et orbi
Conclave is sharper than and superior to The Two Popes; more earthbound and measured, less audacious and less impactful than The Young Pope/New Pope; shades of Death of Stalin minus the Pythonesque flourishes; plenty of juicy, plot-thickening West Wing-style walk-and-talks.
The stylistic stateliness of Berger's film lends it a kind of moral (/spiritual?) gravitas, while effectively concealing its essential and ultimate puckishness: its final twist lands like a clever punchline, though not – to the film's credit – in service of a cheap or obvious (anti-)Catholic joke. Rather, the joke, as it were, is that the titular gathering of cardinals, ostensibly sequestered from the outside world, is a messy, discordant microcosm of that wider world as presently constituted. Not for nothing are non-monastic clergy known as secular clergy. Their concerns, offices, and jurisdiction are in and of this world, the temporal not the eternal, i.e., the saeculum (see esp. Robert Markus on Augustine of Hippo) –– the Church as always already political, at least since the emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea 1699 years ago, probably earlier still.
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