This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Sometimes a lesser book can make a greater film. Robert Harris’s 2016 novel Conclave was a gripping beach read, but a slight work compared to his best. Brought to the screen, it is a perfect two-hour thriller.

The pope is dead, and Cardinal Lawrence is in charge of organising the election of his successor. Played by Ralph Fiennes, he is a man of doubts, about his own vocation and the future of the church. He had wanted to resign, but the dying pope refused him permission. Was it because he wanted him to do this final job?

As ever with Harris, there are puzzles to be solved. What happened in the last pope’s final hours? Who is the man who has just arrived, claiming to be a secret cardinal? There are power games, as the cardinals vie to get a man from their faction into the top job. “It is a war,” one of them tells Lawrence, “and you have to commit to a side.”

I’d enjoyed the book, but I loved the film. Directed by Edward Berger, who gave us All Quiet On The Western Front, everything about it is a masterclass. There are shots that look like they were painted by Raphael. The sound design is perfect. The performances are uniformly excellent, from Fiennes on. This is a world of men, and it is an hour before a woman even speaks. But when she does, it is Isabella Rossellini, in a small, scene-stealing performance as a nun.

It helps that the novel was a tight story, with a small cast and set in one place over a few days. The world of the conclave is at once a familiar one, of ambition and rivalry, and utterly alien: few have ever seen the inside of one of these events. It is a political drama and a closed-room mystery rolled into one.

The Apprentice is also a political drama, though it is one where the audience brings the politics. It’s the story of the early years of Donald Trump, and how he rose as heir to an unpleasant property developer to become a deeply unpleasant property developer — and celebrity — in his own right.

When we first see Donald, he’s an awkward outsider, his boastfulness a cover for his shyness. But corrupt lawyer Roy Cohn sees something in him and takes him under his wing. It is Cohn who teaches him how to take on the world, who blackmails the people in Trump’s way, and who watches the monster he has created outgrow him.

As a young Donald, Sebastian Stan is uncanny. The mannerisms are there, the voice, the verbal tics and also, at first, a sort of vulnerable charm. Jeremy Strong plays Cohn as a mentor without a single scruple. There isn’t a huge amount of explicit politics, but we inevitably see the story through the lens of the later events of Trump’s life. “Attack, attack, attack!” says Cohn. “Admit nothing, deny everything. Claim victory and never admit defeat.”

On a tight budget, and wanting to mix in archive material, the filmmakers matched their footage to the dominant news medium of the episodes of the story. For the seventies, that means 16mm film, and for the eighties, they make it look as though it was filmed on videotape. Some will find it distracting, but to me it left the sense that you’re watching found material.

It’s not a flattering portrait, but it’s unlikely to sway many votes. If whatever Trump has just said or done doesn’t put a voter off him, it’s hard to imagine that this film will. The makers’ problem is knowing how to end the film, and I don’t think they really solved it. Perhaps only the American people can provide a resolution.

Blitz deals with a different origin myth. Written and directed by Steve McQueen, it’s a story of the British home front from 1940. The plot is simple enough: Stepney single mother Rita decides to evacuate her son George to the country, but George jumps from the train and begins a journey home.

If that sounds oddly conventional for our leading black filmmaker, McQueen subverts it by making George mixed-race. On his odyssey, he meets people from across the Empire, some helpful, some not.

The war is a crucial part of how we understand ourselves. Even as it was happening, filmmakers were using the events to tell us stories about who we were: stoic, sacrificial, pulling together. We may now be at a point where the makers need to put up a card at the start to explain to audiences what the Blitz was, but this feels like a descendant of those earlier movies. I found myself thinking of Fires Were Started and Millions Like Us.

But perhaps McQueen’s point is that the millions in those films didn’t look like him. On screen, especially at the time, the war often seemed to be an all-white event — A Matter of Life And Death is perhaps the leading exception to that. Blitz tries to claim the story for the whole nation. At moments here it feels a little heavily done, but it’s an interesting effort.

My enjoyment of it was enhanced because I watched it during the London Film Festival, in a packed Royal Festival Hall. I’ve never watched a film with 2,000 other people before, and I thoroughly recommend it. In an atomised age, there is something magical about the collective experience.