Religious orthodoxy, human desire and institutional corruption all rise to a mesmerizing boil in multi-genre Italian director Domenico Paolella's The Nun and the Devil/Le Monache di Sant'Arcangelo (1973), a cinematic fever dream about power plays within - and brought to bear outwardly upon - a 16th-century Neopolitan nunnery. Inspired by authentic period records and a novella by Stendhal, the film casts Anne Heywood as a senior sister scheming to become Mother Abbess, Ornella Muti as a defiant aristocrat sequestered into religious service, and policier star Luc Merenda as a righteous cleric investigating the convent's sexual and heretical improprieties. It stands out as one of the more noteworthy cinematic successors of Ken Russell's notorious The Devils (1971).