Now streaming on Netflix, The Pope’s Exorcist is one of the few recent theatrical releases that I was looking forward to seeing.

While I spend most of my streaming time on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Max, Peacock, and Hulu binging on TV shows I’ve missed, I look forward to seeing the occasional film as well. Unfortunately, most of the films that have streamed in the past year, I have found boring, some of them so much so that I can’t finish them. At least I finished The Pope’s Exorcist.

I can’t say that I was disappointed in the film because I wasn’t expecting much despite that the fact that the film is taken from the published works of Gabriele Amorth, the real-life Pope’s exorcist who died in 2016 at the age of 91.

Father Amorth’s favorite film was William Friedkin’s 1973 film, The Exorcist. He became good friends with Friedkin who produced the 2017 documentary, The Devil and Father Amorth.

Russell Crowe, who plays Amorth in The Pope’s Exorcist, met with 150 of Father Amorth’s friends who had accompanied him on 150 exorcisms in preparation for the film.

The film, which takes place in 1987 when John Paul II was Pope, is played with a lighter touch than most horror films in keeping with Amorth’s innate sense of humor which got him through his many exorcisms. It seems that the devil hates humor. Keep that in mind if you ever find yourself in a confrontation with him.

The film opens with Father Amorth investigating a presumed possession in a small Italian village that was actually a hallucination. After that, he is summoned before a Church tribunal headed by a vicious American cardinal (Ryan O’Grady) who doesn’t believe in devils or exorcisms. Amorth walks out of the inquisition in disgust, telling the tribunal if they have any more questions to ask the Pope.

The remainder of the film centers around an exorcism that takes place in Spain, with Ireland standing in for Spain. Amorth is sent there by the Pope (Franco Nero) at the request of the local priest (Daniel Zovatto) to investigate the alleged possession of a young Spanish-American boy (Peter DeZousa-Feighoney) who has moved with his sister (Laurel Marsden) and their widowed mother (Alex Essoe) from America to an ancient abbey that she inherited from her recently deceased husband. The abbey is under renovation, uncovering many unspeakable things.

As long as the film focuses on the exorcism itself, it stays interesting with the devil speaking through the boy spitting out even more shocking expletives than the devil spitting out expletives through Linda Blair in Friedkin’s film. Then, however, the film veers into science fiction thriller territory as the devil leaves the boy for Amorth’s body and is eventually cast back into the fires of Hell.

Friedkin’s film was nominated for ten Oscars and won two. This film, directed by Julius Avery, isn’t going to be nominated for any.

Streaming on Peacock is Asteroid City, another recent theatrical release, which I had hoped to watch this week, but haven’t had the time to do so. Maybe next week.

On the media side, Paramount has released a 4K UHD upgrade of William Wyler’s 1953 classic, Roman Holiday, which like several scenes in The Pope’s Exorcist, was filmed in the eternal city albeit seventy years ago.

Wyler’s film is, of course, a classic, one that is best known for making an overnight sensation of Audrey Hepburn who an Oscar for her legendary portrayal of a runaway princess befriended by a reporter (Gregory Peck) and his photographer friend (Eddie Albert).

The film has long been available on standard DVD but was not released on Blu-ray until October 2021. Now less than two years later, it has been given another upgrade to 4k UHD, one that it frankly didn’t need but one that is welcome, nonetheless.

There are no special features on the 4K UHD, but it comes with the 2021 Blu-ray disc which features a wealth of special features including several documentaries on Hepburn’s career.

Also from Paramount, but released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber, is René Clément’s 1966 World War II epic, Is Paris Burning?

Although film historians and commentators Daniel Kremer and Howard S. Berger compare the film to The Longest Day and Schindler’s List, it doesn’t really compare to either. A hit in France at the time of its release, it was a flop in the U.S.

The almost three-hour film is a collection of vignettes at the end of the war when Hitler has ordered his general in charge (Gert Frobe) to burn Paris to the ground as his troops evacuate the city. The suspense is muted because we know that Paris was not burned to the ground then or at any other time. What we are left with is a series of disconnected scenes in which characters appear, have their moment, and quietly disappear.

Coming off best are Leslie Caron, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Alain Delon as French Resistance members who appear early in the film, and Anthony Perkins and George Chakiris who appear briefly as U.S. soldiers at the end of the film. In-between we get the likes of Charles Boyer, Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Robert Stack, and Orosn Welles, none of whom make a serious impression.

There is a scene early in the film that evokes comparison to Roberto Rossellini’s Rome: Open City and there are snippets of the aerial landings played out to better advantage in Daryl F. Zanuck’s The Longest Day. There are also a couple of scenes that evoke moments in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Roman Polanski’s The Pianist but they don’t last.

Recommended for film completists only.

Happy viewing.