The Young Pope

The Young Pope is wickedly funny and deeply insightful.

Despite the pace, the show is a chilling, challenging and visually stunning piece of work.

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.

In the end, it's Law's incredible performance--certainly one of his best--that makes Lenny compelling, mysterious, and complex. We can't help but fall under his charismatic spell and stick with him through trying moments.

The spontaneity rumbling through The Young Pope illuminates the unruly possibilities of human and spiritual connection, and its sly, deadpan wit is often a delight.

The Young Pope is a fascinating mess with a puckish sense of humor and an outsized goal--to know the mind of God.

Intellectually challenging while arguably also going off the rails more than a few times, The Young Pope has its work cut out in luring a sizable audience.

At all times, The Young Pope is a meticulously filmed series featuring a fantastic central performance--plus a bonus Diane Keaton as the Young Pope’s nun mentor!--that knows better than to take itself completely seriously.

The series' strength is that it is difficult to pin down; it zigs when you expect it to zag.

It’s the kind of blank canvas needed to host Sorrentino’s compelling strangeness, making The Young Pope alternatingly addicting and infuriating, like the most interesting ambitious dramas competing to make noise in the age of #PeakTV.

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.

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]

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.

[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.

The Young Pope keeps its audience at a distance, but it also keeps that audience guessing. And not just about the next curveball it’s going to throw or abrupt left turn Lenny’s going to take, but about the fundamental mysteries of faith.

The show is best when Sorrentino and Law produce arresting moments that play like ironic religious art. [13 Jan 2017, p.52]

This is, in many ways, one of the weirdest, most counterintuitive programs ever to get a green light from HBO, and that alone merits the benefit of the doubt for now.

The Young Pope is risky, reckless, flawed and fierce.

Sorrentino's taste for the grotesque at times gets out of hand, but generally serves him well in this comic approach to the hidebound traditions of the miniscule Papal state.

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.

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.

Yes, it's all decidedly odd.

It really depends on how drawn in you are by the Vatican intrigue crafted by show creator Paolo Sorrentino, and how beguiled you are by Jude Law’s performance.

All The Young Pope proves is that absolute power is absolutely boring.

The Young Pope feels more like an eccentric foreign film than a TV series. Except it is a TV series--and little quirks that might seem charming in a 90-minute movie can begin to grate across several episodes.

The humorless Young Pope doesn’t exactly crackle as a backstage political drama. Many of the scenes seem stagey, with actors gliding in and out of large rooms to be received at a wooden desk.

With its over-the-top plot and rococo themes, it just comes across as Eurotrash--intellectually pretentious, but it sure is pretty to look at it.

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.

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.

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.

At times, Sorrentino's approach is bracingly different. But many, many more times, The Young Pope leaves us alternating between admiring Sorrentino's craft and wondering why this is so lugubriously paced and cryptically written.

When it’s good--well, it’s still often pretty bad, but it’s also gorgeous and appealingly weird.

It’s often too straight-faced to be satirical, and the hodge-podge of accents sometimes undercuts the dramatic intensity.

It has languid pacing and an earnest streak about religious devotion. This streak, with its provocative but often specious and unchallenged ideas about celebrity and religiosity, fame and faith, are the only unintentionally risible aspects of the series.

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.

The Young Pope is new, but hardly improved. And to use a very American expression, the series too often feels as if it's all hat, and no cattle.