Agatha Christie's Evil Under The Sun (1982)

This is the third Hercule Poirot mystery written for the screen by Anthony Shaffer after his uncredited work on Murder On The Orient Express in 1974 and his screenplay for Death On The Nile in 1979 and Shaffer again does great service to Agatha Christie's plot, injecting the script with enough humour to help break up the long string of detective-suspect interactions that Agatha Christie mysteries essentially are, while terrific use is made of another exotic setting, this time an island resort in the Adriatic Sea where a star-studded cast of whiny British toffs and Peter Ustinov's Hercule Poirot become embroiled in the beachside murder of a movie star.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Tea With The Dames (aka Nothing Like A Dame) (2018)

I couldn't really make my 78 year-old mother sit through Upgrade which the man on the counter described as featuring "high-octane violence" so I requested two tickets to "the one with the old ladies having tea," and then again upstairs, even though I knew the title very well, rolled my eyes and told the person checking tickets we were seeing "the four old ladies sitting around chatting," and then, in a theatre full of white fluffy clouds of hair and walking frame-littered aisles had a wonderful time with my mum laughing and marvelling at how easy it can be for movie-makers to entertain for a feature-length runtime without high-octane violence or special effects or decapitations (I've just watched Hereditary) and even without a sustained topic of conversation - some guy behind the camera makes up a lazy question whenever the conversation between the women dries up and with just their four bright personalities, a pot of tea and their ability to articulate their wealth of interesting experiences from their work in the theatre or movies, the Dames make Tea With The Dames wonderfully, effortlessly entertaining, abit like the The Trip To series.

★★★★☆

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Murder By Death (1976)

Mystery buffs will love the tangle of traditional mystery elements woven into this 1976 Neil Simon comedy thriller which sees the famous detectives of the world gather in a remote mansion to compete in a sinister challenge put to them by a sinister Truman Capote!

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS