Click here to copy URL

The Pope's Exorcist

2023

Julius Avery

Russell Crowe, Alex Essoe, Daniel Zovatto, Peter DeSouza-Feighoney ...

5.2

6,132

Horror Portrayal of a real-life figure Father Gabriele Amorth, a priest who acted as chief exorcist of the Vatican and who performed more than 100,000 exorcisms in his lifetime. (He passed away in 2016 at the age of 91.) Amorth wrote two memoirs -- An Exorcist Tells His Story and An Exorcist: More Stories -- and detailed his experiences battling Satan and demons that had clutched people in their evil.

	Author	Review
United Kingdom	Catherine Bray Empire	"None of this should work, really, and yet the film just about gets away with it, proving the Lord truly does move in mysterious ways."	NEU
United Kingdom	Mike McCahill The Guardian	"We still have movie stars, even if the pictures thrown up around them are getting smaller, staler and sillier (...) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEG
United States	Guy Lodge Variety	"If this hysterical hackwork has any soul at all, Crowe just about saves it."	NEU
Australia	Sandra Hall Sydney Morning Herald	"Russell Crowe has fun dancing with the devil in this twist on 'The Exorcist' (...) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Meagan Navarro Bloody Disgusting	"Julius Avery employs a lot of over-the-top dramatic flourishes (...) Everyone plays their roles with a stone-cold seriousness (...) A primarily bland affair (...) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEG
United Kingdom	Tim Robey Telegraph	"Russell Crowe nails an Italian accent and various demons in this enjoyably silly cousin of William Friedkin's 1973 horror classic (...) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	NEU
United States	Emma Kiely Collider	"Russell Crowe can't save this unholy disaster"	NEG
United States	David Crow Den of Geek	"Russell Crowe puts a twinkle in the eye of 'The Pope's Exorcist' that lets audiences know it's okay to have fun with spinning heads and devil's games (...) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Johnny Oleksinski New York Post	"Crowe — knowingly, I think — clowns around from start to finish. Even if the horror doesn’t have you screaming, his Italian accent will (...) Rating: ★★ (out of 4)"	NEU
United Kingdom	Fionnuala Halligan Screendaily	"'The Pope’s Exorcist’s' one saving grace is Crowe who still, despite the hound of hell that is this film, is a significant screen presence who commits to some dialogue that only Satan himself could have dreamed up"	NEG
United States	Matt Zoller Seitz rogerebert.com	"One can imagine rewatching bits and pieces of the movie just to savor Crowe's performance and his co-stars' awed responses to it (...) Rating: ★★ (out of 4)"	NEU
Australia	Stephen Romei The Australian	"It is a powerful historical drama and Crowe is outstanding as a real life Vatican exorcist-in-chief (...) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Luke Y. Thompson AV Club	"Not even the power of Russell Crowe should compel you to see this (...) Frankly, an hour and 43 minutes is just too long for this sort of thing"	NEG
United States	John Serba Decider	"Is 'The Pope’s Exorcist' worth watching for Crowe’s wacky performance? Gah – almost. But almost ain’t enough"	NEG
United States	Pete Hammond Deadline	"Crowe is a godsend for this movie, becoming the one genuine beacon of credibility in what is mostly a very Hollywoodized look at the subject matter"	NEU
United States	Chris Evangelista SlashFilm	"Never scary, wholly derivative, and mercifully short"	NEG
United States	Matthew Monagle Austin Chronicle	"An unserious movie handled with consummate craft (...) It's not going to work for everyone, but if you are the kind of viewer who ends up on its wavelength –by god, what a ride (...) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Chris Vognar Rolling Stone	"'The Pope's Exorcist' will certainly never go down as a classic of the genre, but it's better than it has any reason to be"	NEU
United States	Bilge Ebiri Vulture	"'The Pope's Exorcist' may not be a comedy, but it does sometimes feel like a joke. On us"	NEG
United States	Matt Donato IGN	"You can do much better than 'The Pope's Exorcism', but when exploring the depths of an increasingly stale exorcism horror subgenre, you can do worse as well"	NEU
Denmark	Karina Adelgaard Heaven of Horror	"Though I enjoyed the beginning, the ending lost me (...) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEU
United States	Austen Goslin Polygon	"It’s well made and takes its scary moments seriously, but approaches every scene as an opportunity to let the audience have fun, either through scares or jokes"	POS

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.