Murder by Decree (1979)

There's only one way the Jack the Ripper mystery can be resolved in a movie without history being completely upended, so don't expect too many surprises here, but expect a gripping mystery drama that has Sherlock Holmes (Christopher Plummer, who bewilders with his simpering, "feely" portrayal of the great detective) investigating the notorious Jack the Ripper murders and, once he's talked to, among others, Donald Sutherland's psychic and John Gielgud's parliamentarian, Holmes arrives at a solution that any audience member even half interested in the grisly episode will have come across before.

★★★★☆

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Dracula 2000 (2000)

Risen by elaborate means from a treasure vault in modern-day America, Gerard Butler's Dracula is an almost entirely non-verbal ponce whose exhilaration at the sight of ripe virginal necks looks like constipation, but this Wes Craven-endorsed exercise in horror, featuring Christopher Plummer as a Van Helsing descendant, Jonny Lee Miller as geeky-chicy muscle, and Justine Waddell as a woman with a supernatural bond to the ancient bloodsucker, is so-bad-it's-not-so-bad mindless horror-action fun.

★★★☆☆

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Ordeal by Innocence (1985)

The David Brubeck Quartet jazz soundtrack is the best thing and the worst thing about this Agatha Christie adaptation, on the one hand keeping things atmospheric and cool as Donald Sutherland's paleontologist returns to the UK from Antartica after a two-year-long expedition to discover he was the missing alibi of a man since hanged for murder, but on the other hand robbing scenes of weight by going eclectically on and on and suggesting a complexity not shared by the plot.

★★★☆☆

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The Spiral Staircase (1975)

The 1946 movie made a few changes to the Ethel Lina White book (the heroine, Helen, was rendered mute from trauma, the lunatic's motivations were simplified and so made easier to deal with in a quick 83 minutes, and the truly diabolical characters of Nurse Barker and Lady Warren were sanitised) and this 1975 made-for-tv remake of that movie further distances itself from the book by making even more changes, and dopey ones like heavy-handed signposting of the killer's identity and motives, an unnecessary extrapolation of Helen's trauma by way of repetitive flashbacks, and several more murders, at least one of which doesn't even fit the story.

★★☆☆☆

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Hector and the Search For Happiness (2014)

Things momentarily improve when Toni Collette turns up in the last third and shines brightly as the only genuine thing on the screen, but otherwise this is a nauseating affair about a psychiatrist (Simon Pegg) - a sometimes accident-prone Mr Bean, a sometimes naive trenchcoated Monsieur Hulot, an occasionally slapstick Charlie Chaplin, once a midair doctor, and at other times a wide-eyed Walter Mitty fantasist - who zips around the world like that Eat Pray Love person, searching for happiness, which he finds and packages up in fifteen one-line platitudes that appear on the screen occasionally throughout the movie like patronising summary statements of all the nonsense that has come before - cartoon sequences, a brutal kidnapping, mawkish travelogues, cloying romance, slapstick - a series of events seemingly intended as a "wondrous kaleidoscope" of the human condition but just irritating.  

★★☆☆☆

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Knives Out (2019)

Not as effective a homage to the Agatha Christie murder mystery as it is a homage to the parlour game thriller stage plays of the likes of Ira Levin and Anthony Shaffer, director Rian Johnson nods to Sleuth with his mystery novellist's mansion setting crammed full of unusual murder mystery objects (including a prominent Jolly Jack Tar figure) and Deathtrap is brought to mind watching this movie's twisting, changing thriller-, not mystery-, plot and, really, this mostly fun, mostly well-plotted movie is in fact at it worst in its messy third act and attempts at a detective dénouement - Agatha Christie was never so longwinded. 

★★★☆☆

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All The Money In The World (2017)

ATMITW starts thrillingly with director Ridley Scott sweeping us back and forwards through time and around the world from Morocco to Saudi Arabia and New York and back to set up the details of the famous Getty kidnapping of 1973, but after an hour, when the movie goes back to square one and Michelle Williams' and Christopher Plummer's impressive performances become strained and repetitive through their having nothing new to do, it becomes clear that what we are watching is akin to the chess game that Plummer's Getty is momentarily seen playing by himself - no amount of lavish period Italian detail can hide the fact Scott is treading water and using exposition, nebulous developments and inconsistent characterisation to protract to epic length a stalemate.

★★★☆☆

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The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

There's a long stretch in the middle of this ninth James Bond movie, the second starring Roger Moore, that plays out like the Dukes of Hazzard with a car doing a loop-the-loop over a bridge complete with zany popwhistle sound effects while a Boss Hog character gets hot and bothered in the back seat, and other stretches of the movie, which features Nick-Nack the "midget" butler, Miss Goodnight the Bond Girl and Mr Scaramonga the assassin with a superfluous nipple and a golden gun, resemble Fantasy Island and the old tv The Avengers, but not much of it feels like quality James Bond with the movie erring on the side of camp parody.

★★☆☆☆

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Remember (2010)

This thriller presents a Holocaust survivor's ludicrous Memento-style roadtrip across America using pre-prepared notes to overcome his failing memory to search for the Nazi who killed his family, the result being a dreary sequence of the man's encounters with one potential Nazi culprit after another until there comes the heavily sign-posted, utterly unsurprising contrived ending.

★☆☆☆☆

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