Director Edward Berger’s adaptation of Robert Harris’ novel about the election of a new pope is shot and acted as a Serious Movie: all those muted reds and saturated blacks in those lingering shots of the Sistine Chapel ceiling overhead and the embattled Cardinals below, all that anguish and intellection in the faces of Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, et al. (Oh, and not a little ambition, as well: Tucci’s American hopeful insists that every Cardinal, deep down, has picked out the name he’d choose for himself as pope — although it’s hard to believe this applies to the humble, war-weary newcomer who arrives at the conclave’s outset and announces that he was elevated in secret by the late pontiff, despite his mysterious health concerns.) But it’s scored and written as a potboiler in the mode of The Da Vinci Code. (No Opus Dei assassins here, but still plenty of sturm and drang about the dark forces that keep the Church mired in the Dark Ages of Latin rites and sexual rigidity, forces that are threatened by the modern virtues of doubt and openness.) The sawing strings and plunking piano that punctuate the action, the ponderous portentousness of pronouncements like, “The Church is not tradition; the Church is what we do next.” And the fact that in the end, the drama is driven not by the Cardinals’ ideas and ideals, but their secret sins: the sexual puritan with a promiscuous past, the lover of Latin with a heart full of hate, etc. It’s possible that the film takes itself entirely too seriously; fortunately, the viewer is under no such obligation, and may have a good time as a result. (2024) — Matthew Lickona