10 great films about popes

The papacy and cinema go back a long way. Leo XIII became the first moving picture pope in July 1896, with successor Pius X being filmed in 1907. He would become the first cine-saint when he was canonised in 1954, two years after Henri Vidon had played him in The Secret Conclave (1952), which was the first feature to recreate a papal election. 

Pius actually disapproved of moving images and forbade their exhibition in churches in 1909. Pius XI and Pius XII would each issue encyclicals on the responsibilities of filmmakers, which deeply impacted upon Hollywood via the Catholic Legion of Decency.

Only a handful of real-life popes have reached the screen. Leo the Great took on Attila the Hun in Attila and Sign of the Pagan (both 1954), while Alexander II supported the Archbishop of Canterbury in Becket (1964). Paul III stood up to Henry VIII in The Tudors (2007), while Leo X came off second best to a German monk in Luther (2003). But it’s only recent pontiffs like John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul I who have been the subject of full biopics.

The Papacy has also figured in numerous fictional films, including crime dramas (The Godfather Part III, 1990), thrillers (Angels & Demons, 2009), horrors (The Pope’s Exorcist, 2023) and numerous comedies, including Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994) and The Pope’s Toilet (2007).

Some have proved more controversial than others, with Il Pap’occhio (1980) being confiscated for insulting the Church, while The Pope Must Die (1991) was renamed The Pope Must Diet to avoid giving overt offence. Things have changed, though, with Pius XIII (Jude Law) striding out in white speedos in Paolo Sorrentino’s The New Pope (2019), the sequel to his acclaimed 2016 satire, The Young Pope.

It’s not known if Pope Francis tuned in, though he actively participated in Wim Wenders’s Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (2018) and Gianfranco Rosi’s In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis (2022). It remains to be seen whether his successor will be so cine-astute.

Director: Carol Reed

Overly subjected to lazy critical barbs about paint drying, Carol Reed’s adaptation of Irving Stone’s bestseller about the decoration of the Sistine Chapel manages to be both imposing and intimate in its depiction of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s labours and his testy relationship with Pope Julius II. The animosity between stars Charlton Heston (as Michelangelo) and Rex Harrison (as the pope) occasionally seethes through in a way that makes their clashes much more compelling than Julius’s bellicose distractions and Michelangelo’s limp dalliance with the Contessina de’ Medici (Diane Cilento). 

The towering sets erected at Dino De Laurentiis’s Roman studio earned one of the film’s five Oscar nominations, while Harrison was shortlisted for a Golden Globe. The prologue is undeniably pompous, but the imagery photographed in both Todd-AO and CinemaScope versions is magisterial and glorious.

Director: Michael Anderson

MGM clearly intended this adaptation of Morris West’s tome to be a prestige production. Fifteen cameras were sent to Rome to cover the 1965 Ecumenical Council. However, West and James Poe (neither of whom would be credited) struggled to produce a script that was acceptable to the Vatican, and Oscar-nominated sets had to be built at Cinecittà after shooting permission was withheld. 

Lee Marvin was initially suggested for the role of Kiril Lakota, the Russian archbishop who is released from a gulag and dispatched to Rome by Soviet premier Kamenev (Laurence Olivier) – all in the hope he can prevent a potentially apocalyptic showdown with a famine-stricken China. However, Anthony Quinn was cast and he persuasively conveys the isolation of a holy man entrusted with an impossible job. Subplots involving Oskar Werner’s progressive theologian and David Janssen’s adulterous reporter feel shoehorned. But the film capably combines solemnity and suspense in reassessing the Church’s mission.

Director: Michael Anderson

The legendary Ioannes Anglicus was probably not pope for two years in the 850s. However, her inclusion among the 172 plaster busts in Siena Cathedral holds out the possibility that she did really exist and that the Vatican has since conspired in airbrushing her out of history. With hard facts being at a premium, it’s not surprising that this 1972 feature tells a very different story to the later Pope Joan (2009) and Joan the Pope (2016). 

Liv Ullmann played two roles in the original cut, which had its modern-day sequences removed by the distributor prior to release (a restored version was released as She… Who Would Be Pope in 2009). As well as Joan, the street preacher who disguised herself as a man during the unrest that followed the death of Charlemagne, she also plays a 20th-century evangelist who consults a psychiatrist to determine whether she is Joan’s reincarnation.

Director: Krzysztof Zanussi

As the first non-Italian pope for 455 years, John Paul II was always going to appeal to filmmakers. The scripts were of varying quality, but versions of his life story have attracted actors of the calibre of Albert Finney, Cary Elwes and Jon Voight, and Piotr Adamczyk. The Pole even became the first pontiff to have his own animated feature, John Paul II: The Friend of All Humanity (2006). 

But it was compatriot Krzysztof Zanussi who served him best, as he follows Karol Wojtyla from his traumatic 1920s boyhood to his triumphal homecoming mass in Kraków in 1979. Combining archive material and dramatic reconstruction, Zanussi reflects on Poland’s subjugation by the Nazis and the Soviet Union. In true Cinema of Moral Anxiety style, he also shows how the forces that shaped a pope who came to symbolise resistance and hope also inspired the spirit of Solidarity – a spirit that could not now be so easily silenced because of his blessing.

Director: Christoph Schrewe

Only Pius II has made a detailed record of a conclave and Paul Donovan’s enthralling script draws on this text, while racking focus on to Rodrigo Borgia (Manuel Fullola), who has been left exposed by the death of his unpopular uncle, Callixtus III. With the Great Schism and the Fall of Constantinople within recent memory, the 18 conclaving cardinals are caught in a political bind. But the tussle for power becomes more personal when the homespun Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Brian Blessed) and French sophisticate Guillaume d’Estouteville (James Faulkner) emerge as the only viable papabile. 

Blessed and Faulkner respond splendidly, as director Christoph Schrewe sets them scheming in candlelit corners of the Apostolic Palace. Moreover, he ends drolly by having Rodrigo (the future Alexander VI) keep an assignation with Vannozza dei Cattanei that will spark the relishable shenanigans in all those salacious mini-series about the Borgias.

Director: Christian Duguay

The year after he had been eulogised in the profile Pastor Angelicus (1942), Pius XII was confronted with the Nazi occupation of Rome and the razzia. His response (or lack thereof) has been examined on screen in a number of dramatisations and documentaries. Despite the release of papers pertaining to the pope’s beatification – which were cited by this teleplay defending his reluctance to denounce the deportations for fear of provoking a backlash similar to the one in the Netherlands in July 1942 – his reputation remains mired. 

Christian Duguay’s attempt to proclaim Pius as the Vatican Schindler is too often undermined by inaccuracies and assumptions and is waylaid by a melodramatic Ghetto love story. In the current absence of anything more conclusive, however, this deeply flawed film at least has the merit of provoking debate.

Director: Nanni Moretti

Having previously played a priest in four films, Michel Piccoli was elevated to the cardinalate in Nanni Moretti’s witty treatise on faith, power and responsibility. Moretti also plays the psychoanalyst who is summoned when the newly elected Cardinal Melville (named after French auteur Jean-Pierre Melville) has a panic attack and flees the Vatican in disguise. There are echoes here of Savage Grace (1986), in which Leo XIV (Tom Conti) no longer feels worthy of being chosen by God. But, as Moretti told Filmmaker magazine, he was less interested in questioning belief or critiquing the papacy than in exploring expectation and “the difference between the roles we’re called on to play and the things we’re capable of actually doing”. 

A visual highlight is the volleyball tournament that Moretti organises to keep the enconclaved cardinals occupied while search parties scour Rome, although the actor seen diving to retrieve a shot cracked a femur in the process.

Director: Fernando Meirelles

Receiving a 417% rise in Netflix viewership following the death of Pope Francis, Anthony McCarten’s adaptation of his own stage play could hardly claim to be gospel truth. Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce) never travelled to Rome to tender his resignation to Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins). So, the conversation that dominates Fernando Meirelles’s film never took place. However, the words spoken were nimbly lifted from speeches and documents to reflect the opposing positions of the conservative German and the progressive Argentinian. 

The Sistine Chapel was also a cut’n’paste job at Cinecittà, with the frescoes being a giant stick-on tattoo. Each prelate may have survived a scandal in his past, but their humanity is adroitly conveyed by Pryce and Hopkins, who, like McCarten, received Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations. Most disappointingly, the pontiffs never did share pizza while cheering on their nations in the 2014 World Cup final, although Inspector Rex was indeed Benedict’s favourite TV show.

Director: Marco Bellocchio

Occupying the chair of St Peter for 32 years, Pius IX is the longest-reigning pope. Having endured exile during the short-lived Roman Republic, he oversaw the loss of the Papal States during the 19th-century Risorgimento and declared himself to be “the prisoner of the Vatican”. The epithet could have been claimed with equal justification, however, by Edgardo Mortara, the Jewish boy from Bologna who was removed from his parents in 1851 because he had been baptised as an ailing infant by a Catholic maid fearing for his soul. 

Had Steven Spielberg, who scouted locations for his own version, been able to find a boy to play the indoctrinated Edgardo, Marco Bellocchio’s multi-award-winning recreation would never have been made. But Bellocchio was fortunate in finding young Enea Sala (who had never set foot inside a church before the shoot) to play opposite Paolo Pierobon’s embittered Bishop of Rome.

Director: Edward Berger

For all its engrossing plausibility, one can only speculate about the extent to which Edward Berger’s adaptation of Robert Harris’s novel approaches documentary realism. Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) atypically combines the duties of dean and camerlengo and breaches tradition in allowing Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) to vote when he is ‘in pectore’ or unannounced. Moreover, the lobbying between ballots in the Casa Santa Marta owes much to the imagination and a shrewd appreciation of human nature (even under the influence of the Holy Spirit). 

But most experts agree that the rituals inside the Sistine Chapel are reasonably authentic. They’re certainly compelling and testify once more to the brilliance of Cinecittà’s set builders (although these were rumoured to have been recycled from The Young Pope). Peter Straughan won best screenplay at the Oscars and BAFTAs; at the latter, Conclave also achieved the rare feat of winning both best British film and best film.