Death On The Nile (2022)

Kenneth Brannagh does a much better job with his adaptation of Agatha Christie's Death On The Nile than he did with his Murder On The Orient Express in 2019, but patchy acting (from Annette Bening, especially, and from Russell Brand, too, on the few occasions he is permitted to speak), wonky cartoony cgi environments, some important clues that couldn't be more clanging if they were delivered by a town herald, and some perverse embellishments to Christie's story (that absurd dancing, and that moustache backstory!) keep this from being a great or, given the excellent 1978 adaptation, even a necessary remake.

★★★☆☆

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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.

★★★★☆

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