The Two Popes Review

Netflix announced in 2017 that it would produce Anthony McCarten's script, with Fernando Meirelles (City of God) directing, and shot it in 2018 in Rome, Buenos Aires and a full-size Sistine Chapel built at Cinecittà. McCarten is candid that most of it is speculation: some arguments draw on the two men's published words, but the private meetings, the jokes and the evenings in front of the television are invented, and Francis said he had not watched television since the 1990s.

What makes it work is the casting. Anthony Hopkins plays Benedict as a lonely, exact intellectual who knows he is not loved, and Jonathan Pryce, who looks remarkably like Francis, gives Bergoglio an easy warmth with a guilty past underneath. Their scenes, arguments about compromise and change that turn into jokes and back again, carry the film.

The Argentine flashbacks, with Juan Minujín as the young Bergoglio under the junta, are dutiful and slow, and one Catholic critic objected that the film implies Benedict shielded Marcial Maciel, when Benedict was the pope who removed him. Pryce, Hopkins and McCarten's screenplay were all Oscar-nominated, and Netflix viewing of the film rose 417 percent after Francis died in April 2025.