The Pledge (2001)

The trouble with director Sean Penn's mostly-gripping The Pledge, about a cop who promises a grieving mother to find the killer of her child, is not Jack Nicholson's gnarlier-than-usual detective (compare him with the clean-cut Foyle-like turns of It Happened In Broad Daylight's Heinz Rührmann and Cold Light of Day's Richard E Grant) nor the story's movement from the Swiss Alps to Nevada, but Penn's muddling Dürrenmatt's screenplay - a jaunty mystery with a detective-novel ending - with the author's later book, "The Pledge - Requiem for the Detective Novel, which refashions that screenplay's plot into a much darker existential drama; Penn borrows scenes from the earlier 1958 adaptation and incorporates aspects of the screenplay (such as a sequence that demystifies the serial killer), and so detracts from the book's grim philosophy.

★★★☆☆

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A Man For All Seasons (1968)

A six-time Academy Award-winning historical drama screenwritten by Robert Bolt based on his play, A Man For All Seasons tells the story of Thomas More, the Lord High Chancellor of England from 1529 to 1532, who despite political pressure did not waver in his Catholic religious principles even when the desire for an heir with his mistress Anne Boleyn led King Henry VIII to usurp papal authority.

★★★★☆

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Agatha Christie's Death On The Nile (1978)

Agatha Christie wrote Death On The Nile while staying in Aswan, Egypt at the Old Cataract Hotel overlooking the Nile, in the 30s, so watching this film version of her book with its rich period detail - cream linen suits, cloche hats, pearls, pith helmets, cravats, stockings, against the dust and dry of Egyptian ruins or in the colonial opulence of saloon bars and cigar lounges - it is easy to imagine Christie is in it or that the film depicts a moment in her life, and beneath the stiff social propriety of the British characters aboard The Karnak, a river paddle boat to Cairo, runs a terrific thread of suspense as someone kills off several of those aboard; it is up to Peter Ustinov's Hercule Poirot to determine who the murderer is among characters played by the likes of Mia Farrow, David Niven, Bette Davis, Maggie Smith and Angela Lansbury.

★★★★☆

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