The Nun and the Devil

One of the better nunsploitation films, largely because it is more interested in politics than in flesh. In a 16th-century Italian convent the abbess is dying, and the sisters (Anne Heywood chief among them, a very young Ornella Muti in the cloister) scheme, betray and destroy each other over the succession, in a story drawn from real convent scandals of the period. Domenico Paolella plays it as costume power-drama, all Renaissance intrigue, class resentment and the trap of women shut away for other people's convenience, with the expected cruelty arriving late rather than wall to wall. It looks handsome and takes its own accusations seriously. Closer to a hard-edged historical drama than to the whip-and-wimple stuff the packaging promised.