The Pope's Memoir, Oscar Nominees And A Mafia Exhibition What To Read, See And Do This Week

(MENAFN- The Conversation) I finally got round to watching Conclave last week. Two hours of Ralph Fiennes and Isabella Rossellini in Oscar-nominated performances alongside Lucian Msamati and a stray papal turtle. The scandals. The tension. The outfits (also nominated). A sublime experience.

On the way home from the cinema, I became lost in background reading.“How much do we know about real conclaves controversies?” I jabbed into Google.“How close was the film's pope to the current pontiff, Francis?” As I soon realised, the real Vatican is frequently stranger than fiction. Take Wake Up!, for example, Pope Francis's progressive rock album (no, really) which was released in 2015.

More surprises are in store in his autobiography, Hope , which was published this week. It's the first time a pope has written a memoir. As explained by our reviewer, the appropriately named historian of the Catholic church Professor Liam Temple, we've never known this much about the pontiff before. We learn that young Francis was an avid football and basketball fan, for example. But also, that he's now a deeply remorseful man, often impatient and periodically anti-social.

Read more: Pope Francis autobiography: we've never known so much about the pontiff before

The book had us wondering. Would you rather learn about historic figures through their own words, or the art of others? Answer our poll to let us know and reply to this email with your favourite memoir of all time. My colleague Naomi's is Just Kids by Patti Smith.

The Brutalist swept the Oscars shortlist yesterday with ten nominations including best picture, director and actor in a leading role. We asked a real architect to review the film.

Read more: The Brutalist: an architect's take on a film about one man's journey to realise his visionary building

Adrian Brody plays Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth. He's arrived in Philadelphia after surviving the Holocaust and is taken under the patronage of wealthy industrialist, Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce). It's a monumental work about the foundations, both literal and ideological, of post-war America. Three-and-a-half hours long (with a welcome intermission) it is staggering in its scale and ambition – a film that really must be seen in the cinema.

For fans, the Academy's support is a relief. For the past week, nominations were in doubt due to a growing backlash around the film's use of AI to enhance the authenticity of the actors' Hungarian accents. The language's hard-to-imitate vowel sounds proved tricky even for Brody, whose mother was a Hungarian refugee. For Dr Dominic Lees, who has been researching the use of AI in filmmaking for six years, this creative decision is hardly shocking, especially in comparison to other recent uses of the technology – we're looking at you, Here .

Read more: AI voice technology used in The Brutalist is nothing new – the backlash is about transparency

With a climate-change denier back in the White House, the London opening of Kyoto at the West End's Soho Place could hardly be timelier. The Royal Shakespeare Company production dramatises the intense negotiations of the world's first climate change treaty. In doing so, it“turns diplomacy into a contact sport”, eliciting gales of laughter from the audience and raising plentiful questions to ponder on the way home.

Kyoto is playing at London's Soho Place theatre until May 3.

We caused some controversy last week with our rundown of six covers of Bob Dylan songs that were better than the originals .“What no Guns N' Roses, Knocking on Heaven's Door?” asked one reader.“I'll give you Hendrix, but all the others are ersatz compared to Bob's versions,” proclaimed another.

Hopefully one thing Dylan fans can agree on is the strength of Timothee Chalamet's Oscar-nominated performance in the new biopic, A Complete Unknown. To our reviewer's mind, he brings charm, vulnerability and authenticity to what will surely become one of the stand-out roles of his career.

Read more: A Complete Unknown: Chalamet's brilliant performance captures the elusive essence of a young Dylan

You might expect an exhibition of mafia photos to depict conflict, violence, men in suits and victims in pieces. But a new show of Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia at London's Photographers' Gallery instead presents images of lovers, flowers and children in the street.

Born in 1935, Battaglia was one of the first women reporters in Italy. This is the first major UK exhibition of her work since her death in 2022. Through her lens, she frequently captured the ambiguous reality of the mafia in Sicily. The revolution of her work was the way it stripped the mafia of its glamour, by showing not only its violence, the murders, the desperation, but also the banality and the normalisation of their crimes.

Letizia Battaglia: Life, Love and Death in Sicily is on at The Photographers' Gallery, London, until February 23.

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