The mother of all costume dramas. Conclave starts with a simple, can’t-miss premise. We will stick ourselves in the Vatican for two hours. What we have to spend on the elaborate set will be offset for by never having to change locations. We will be surrounded by absolutely fabulous art, by marble columns reaching up high over the top of the frame, by the sea of cardinal red. If we don’t have much in the way of sex or violence, the dopamine receptors in our brain will be lit up by cardinals, and here the film’s producers are really onto something. Archbishops don’t do it, even popes somehow don’t quite do it, but imagine being poolside in Hollywood and picturing this project: an entire College of Cardinals, gathering for a cardinal conclave, all in cardinal red, with round red cardinal hats and red cardinal suits and sometimes special cardinal mitres, all going about their cardinal controversies, and then, as the last drunken archbishop totters away with the Swiss Guards closing the gates behind him, the cardinals are sequestered, so that (except for the kitchen staff, who keep annoyingly intruding into the narrative in order to provide some gender balance) they are only ever interacting with other cardinals, getting onto special buses in which the only other passengers are cardinals, staying in special cardinal hotels that look well like it might be the set of John Wick but now booked-out entirely for cardinals, and if it happens to rain at any point in the film then the entire conclave will be issued with special white cardinal umbrellas that, needless to say, when glimpsed from a balcony shot, color-coordinate perfectly with the red cardinal outfits as they sashay slowly forward to the accompaniment of string instruments.