Birth (2004)

Jonathan Glazer's beautifully acted and beautiful-to-look-at Birth, about an affluent Upper East Side New York family intruded upon by a boy who claims to be a reincarnated dead husband, wants to be taken seriously - and some people oblige, calling it a mystery and treatise on profound things like belief and loss, but it plays out more like a deadly earnest fairytale - that is to say, it plays out ridiculously - and while the final scene does a good job, finally, of grounding the first-world problems of these toffs in some real emotion, getting there is far too long a road - an absurd and monotonous one - with an especially icky bath scene and kiss scene along the way.

★★★☆☆

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The Big Sleep (1946)

Even Humphrey Bogart said he didn't know what was happening scene-to-scene in this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's hardboiled private eye crime story, and having just read the book, I can attest that the film is faithful to its sprawling mess of a plot - sprawling because Chandler in fact wrote it by fusing two previously published short stories, merging characters, renaming others, caring less about resolving plot threads and more about building not so much a mystery as a noir character study of criminal California circa 1940, delivered in hilarious deadpan and steeped in worldweary immorality.

★★★★☆

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Murder On The Orient Express (1974)

Given it is essentially a string of twelve or thirteen dialogues between Hercule Poirot and one suspect after another aboard the snowed-in Orient Express, scene of a ghastly murder, it is surprising how engaging Sidney Lumet's 1974 film version of Agatha Christie's book is, helped of course by its all-star cast and the fact the story is inspired by the real-life Lindbergh kidnapping, a crime that captivated and so outraged the world one suspects it would have even turned Agatha Christie's world famous eggheaded Belgian detective into a revenge-murder conspirator.

★★★★☆

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Agatha Christie's Appointment with Death (1988)

Peter Ustinov's last appearance as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot was in this 1988 film version of Appointment with Death, a mystery set in the Holy Land with more characters than it knows what to do with, a threadbare plot full of inconsistent characterisation, and clues so artlessly dished out they couldn't be more obvious if they were announced by dinner gong.

★★☆☆☆

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