THE old joke, that Italian film directors, irrespective of their politics, are members of the Communist Party, oddly enough never applied to Nanni Moretti whose films are irresistibly amusing, rich, complex in their construction and self-referential in a way that opens his unfailingly Marxist critique of Italian society and Italian capitalism to endless analysis.

Even when seemingly simple entertainment, Morretti’s films always cast a sharply critical eye over the complexities and contradictions of Italian life and politics. An early critic of the corrupting influence of the privately owned mass media, he is committed to a didactic and pedagogical purpose, to change people’s minds.

The opening scenes of his We Have A Pope (2011) take us around a cardinal’s conclave in the Vatican as each priest silently utters a prayer to their God: “Not me lord, not me.”