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Positive:
21
Mixed:
17
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Jan 9, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The Young Pope is as compellingly watchable as anything else you’ll find on TV. Sorrentino intuitively understands that which makes Catholicism--with its crosscurrents of guilt and exuberant hope as well as the opulent pageantry of the Vatican--fascinating grist for storytelling. And he’s unafraid to go what seems at first too far in service of a story that finds the universal in one warped leader’s specificities.
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Jan 13, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The show is too smart to be so easily dismissed, but whether its depiction of Vatican politics--and especially its title character’s abrasive personality--warrant devotion will be in the eye of the beholder. Lenny’s not a likable character, but The Young Pope offers addictive stories of unpredictable political maneuvering.
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TV Guide MagazineJan 13, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Thanks to Law's bravura performance, bristling with cagey charisma and cruelty playful and arrogant inscrutability, this young pope has a way of keeping everyone off guard. [16-29 Jan 2017, p.16]
Jan 12, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The Young Pope is frequently tedious in a very dazzling way. But it’s also an extraordinary portrait of the kind of loneliness and neediness that sparks in some men an almost psychopathic quest to dominate others, and of the myopic enablers who convince themselves that their work is God’s plan.
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Jan 12, 2017
Season 1 Review:
[Paulo Sorrentino] invents a coolly seductive physical world to match the oddness of his story. Even as The Young Pope slowly moves among its different tones--serious religious drama, soap opera, satire, dystopian nightmare--it remains consistent in one important quality: stark originality.
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Jan 12, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The Young Pope really starts to click when Lenny's mentor, Cardinal Michael Spencer (James Cromwell), enters in episode two. When someone finally stands up to the power mad pontiff, the series excels. It still has it idiosyncrasies but much like the character himself, it takes some time to see the potential of The Young Pope.
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Jan 15, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Merely dazed: stylistically, narratively, theologically. Part soap opera, part jeremiad, and part dark comedy, its various incarnations don't always mesh very well. It strives for epic magnificence and falls well short of coherence...And yet it's kind of entertaining.
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Jan 17, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The specificity with which he [Paolo Sorrentino] executes The Young Pope speaks to a brand of vision whose interest is the art as opposed to the venue in which it is presented. Consequently, it’s possible to appreciate the magnitude and originality of his extraordinary approach while admitting that it doesn’t effectively tell us the whole story, or the best one.
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Jan 13, 2017
Season 1 Review:
HBO made five of the series’ 10 episodes available to critics, and perhaps The Young Pope makes sense as a whole. Half the loaf, however, is half-baked. In spite of that, and because of wonderful performances by James Cromwell, as an older cardinal who was Belardo’s mentor and resents that he wasn’t chosen pope himself, Cécile de France as the Vatican’s marketing director, and Orlando, The Young Pope has something that makes you keep with it.
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Jan 13, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The problem with The Young Pope is that it never artfully draws you in deep enough to care. Created and directed by Oscar winner Paolo Sorrentino ("The Great Beauty"), it is drearily paced, choppy and often self-consciously bizarre. It's beautiful to gaze upon, filled with sumptuous shots that look like majestic oil paintings. And the supporting cast is impressive.
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Jan 12, 2017
Jan 12, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Like the Vatican itself, Pope is beautiful, lush and carefully, formally composed. It’s also oddly airless and cold, more a series of striking pictures than a living and breathing slice of life, one that leaves you with no way in and little reason to care. Style doesn't just trump substance here; it's the only substance The Young Pope has. And that seems wrong.
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