Review | The Two Popes: Anthony Hopkins, Jonathan Pryce a joy to watch as Popes Benedict XVI and Francis

Hopkins and Pryce absorb into their characters so completely that it’s sometimes difficult to remember we’re watching a dramatisation

The film shines when the pair banter and gently argue about everything from the finer points of Catholic theology to the Beatles

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Jonathan Pryce (left) and Anthony Hopkins in Netflix’s The Two Popes. Photo: Peter Mountain/Netflix

Published: 2:00am, 7 Dec 2019Updated: 4:08pm, 8 Dec 2019

The Two Popes has become an audience favourite on this autumn’s film festival circuit. It took the best film prize at the Middleburg Film Festival in the US state of Virginia in October, and it’s easy to see why.

The film is a lively, intriguing and insistently humanistic flight of fancy, featuring imagined conversations between hard-line conservative Pope Benedict XVI and his more progressive successor, Pope Francis. It brims with wit, warmth and some tantalising what-ifs.

Whether the fact that it is mostly pure speculation from screenwriter Anthony McCarten (The Theory of Everything, Darkest Hour ) will get in the way of the audience’s enjoyment will depend on each viewer’s threshold for artistic licence.

The film starts with Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce), as Francis was known before his papacy, visit Benedict (Anthony Hopkins) at the papal summer residence to request in person what he had been asking for in several unanswered letters: permission to retire. But Benedict – in failing health, besieged by financial wrongdoing at the Vatican and a sexual abuse scandal that is roiling the Catholic Church around the globe – has something else in mind.

Over a few days, which take the duo from the pope’s extravagant lakeside gardens at Castel Gandolfo near Rome to the Sistine Chapel, the two banter and gently argue about everything from the finer points of Catholic theology to the Beatles.

Review | The Two Popes: Anthony Hopkins, Jonathan Pryce a joy to watch as Popes Benedict XVI and Francis

Hopkins and Pryce absorb into their characters so completely that it’s sometimes difficult to remember we’re watching a dramatisation The film shines when the pair banter and gently argue about everything from the finer points of Catholic theology to the Beatles

Hopkins and Pryce absorb into their characters so completely that it’s sometimes difficult to remember we’re watching a dramatisation

The film shines when the pair banter and gently argue about everything from the finer points of Catholic theology to the Beatles