Agatha Christie's Seven Dials (2026)

Agatha Christie wasn't called the Queen of Mystery for her occasional attempts at the espionage thriller, as any reader of The Big Four, They Came to Baghdad, and Passenger to Frankfurt can attest, and so, except for a ridiculously embellished final reveal, we can't entirely blame the makers of this three-part series for the ludicrous plotting of their adaptation of The Seven Dials Mystery, a comic adventure after Nancy Drew rather than a traditional murder mystery, about British government agents, scientists, spies, absurd secret societies, and, when you dissect it, a circular story of unlikely coincidence rather than sensible clues.

★★★☆☆

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Agatha Christie "Marple": The Sittaford Mystery (2006)

Despite not really fitting the image I have in my head of the character, Geraldine McEwan is a good Miss Marple - shrew and mischevious, her eyes positively twinkle as she contemplates twisted human psychology and murder, so much that you can forgive her spritely frame and impish energy - and even though she has been thrust into this adaptation of a book she didn't even appear in, she adds good value to the story, quietly solving a murder that takes place in a snowed-in inn populated with a star-studded array of likely suspects (Carey Mulligan, Timothy Dalton, Mel Smith, James Murray, and more, in a scenario very reminiscent to the one in The Mousetrap).

★★★☆☆

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Ten Little Indians (1965)

Agatha Christie's grisly plot is so good, movie adaptations just can not mess it up, and even this prosaic 1965 version, filmed in large and austere, airy sets that undo the plot's claustrophobia, manages to be thrilling - keeping things fresh is the setting of a snowed-in mansion (not an island off the Devon coast), some deaths from great mountain heights, and a hilarious but oddly effective "Whodunnit break" (a one-minute pause with a voice-over that prompts audience members to turn to their neighbour and hazard a guess at whodunnit!)

★★★☆☆

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See How They Run (2022)

Occasionally, watching this comedy mystery, you'll think, "I think that was supposed to be funny," as the dialogue between Saoirse Ronan's police officer and Sam Rockwell's inspector - clearly meant to crackle and zing - falls and clangs like a dropped murder weapon, which is a shame because setting a murder mystery around the staging in London of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap is interesting, especially given in the very beginning of the play's record-length run Richard Attenborough played the role of Sergeant Trotter and the grisly real-life case of the Rillington Place serial murders were being investigated, both details that feature in the clever historical context of this otherwise laugh-free, leaden, and, for a long middle stretch, chaotic film.

★★☆☆☆ (almost one star)

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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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Ten Little Indians (1989)

Transporting Agatha Christie's classic mystery, an early example of the modern slasher, to an African safari rather than an island off the Devon coast was probably just meant to reduce staging costs to the purchase of a single tent, and it gives the classic story of gathered guests being picked off one by one by a mysterious safari host a distinctly Gilligan's Island-feel as our gathered guests, or doomed victims, including Frank Stallone as Phillip Lombard, take showers behind cane shower screens, traverse ravines in a rickety vine cable car,  and deliver lines of dialogue in the wooden manner of The Skipper.

★★☆☆☆

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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 Mirror Crack'd (1980)

A Hollywood production sweeps into St Mary Mead and brings with it highly-strung celebrity A-lister Marina Gregg (Elizabeth Taylor), her arm-candy husband (Rock Hudson), their entourage of secretaries and house people and production staff and, among them, a murderer, and it is up to Angela Lansbury's terrible Miss Marple, an American-accented beanpole covered in cobwebs, to solve the poisoning cases central to Agatha Christie's classic mystery.

★★★☆☆

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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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Miss Marple: 4.50 To Paddington (1987)

I like these BBC adaptations of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple mysteries, including this particular one based on What Mrs McGillicuddy Saw, because I like the opening credit titlecards and the jaunty Antiques Roadshow music that kicks in every time a body or scandal or an excuse to have a cup of tea turns up, and I especially like the 80-something Joan Hickson's Miss Marple, THE Miss Marple in my mind, who here enlists a young friend Lucy Eyelesbarrow to infiltrate the Crackenthorpe Manor to investigate a claim that a woman was strangled on a nearby train.

★★★☆☆

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And Then There Were None (aka Ten Little Indians) (1945)

Like most other film versions of Agatha Christie's 1939 murder mystery, Rene Clair's 1945 adaptation fudges the book's climax, adhering instead to the more sanitised ending of Christie's 1943 stage play, but otherwise this movie is faithful and the story of characters summoned by a mysterious stranger to a remote island where they are picked off one by one is suitably chilling, creepy, puzzling, and there is also plenty of humour like a wonderful scene of cabin fever paranoia and fear that literally has each character being watched as they in turn watch another.

★★★★☆

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Crooked House (2017)

Given it is beautifully acted, beautiful to look at, and faithful to its source material, perhaps the reason this Agatha Christie adaptation underwhelms has to do with the story itself, about a Greek business mogul murdered in his mansion full of oddbod family members - they are all grotesque and the solution renders a lot of what has come before rather extraneous..

★★★☆☆

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Murder on the Orient Express (2017)

The Orient Express is snowed in but Kenneth Branagh's movie, so fussily presented it looks more like the Polar than the Orient Express, is a runaway train ripping through the details of Agatha Christie's book at breakneck speed so that there is no weight to any of it, and at this pace no number of sweeping camera shots back and forth over the enormous cast helps commit any of the individuals to memory - they are all far less important than Branagh's overthought, spectacularly odd moustaches - and in the end it is left to an overbearing soundtrack to insist, ridiculously, on the profundity of end scenes.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Witness For The Prosecution (2016)

Fans of the 1957 film starring Charles Laughton, which was thrilling and funny, will be wary of the changes made to Agatha Christie's plot in this grim 2016 BBC TV miniseries (for example the inclusion of two grubby sex scenes, the absence of Laughton's cantakerous, cigar-chomping Sir Wilfrid Robarts who is replaced by Toby Jones's poor, unhappily married solicitor with a tragic backstory, not to mention a very unexpected second trial for the murder of Kim Cattral's Emily French), but as things proceed it becomes clear these deviations are not simply changes for the sake of change - this is not an update but a tv miniseries adaptation and purists will come to appreciate and will be kept on their toes by the clever embellishments.

★★★★☆

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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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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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Endless Night (1972)

I can think of three other Agatha Christie books that use the same major plot device but this film version of Endless Night, about a chauffeur whose dreams of owning a house at Gypsy's Acre come true when he marries well, is played as a thriller, not a murder mystery - the body count is still zero at the 75 minute mark - and there is a touch of the paranormal with one elderly gypsy character drifting around spouting macabre stuff about a curse, making it a more interesting film version than many adaptations of the Queen of Crime's books.

★★★☆☆

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Witness For The Prosecution (1957)

Based on an Agatha Christie short story so clever she adapted it into a play so ingenious it was turned into a movie, this murder mystery starring Charles Laughton as a lawyer who takes on a murder case while convalescing is the sort of whodunnit you wish you could turn back time and discover for the first time again, but knowing the twists and turns of the plot is also a source of pleasure as is seeing everyone doing what they do so well, including Marlene Dietrich as a cool German singer and Tyrone Power as her husband and murder-accused.

★★★★★

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And Then There Were None (2015)

This is a ripper star-studded BBC adaptation of the oft-adapted Agatha Christie serial killer mystery, one made for tv that thankfully sticks to the plot of the book (so many others deviate), and one that looks great, sounds terrific, and even if you are someone who has watched six or seven other iterations and know very well the whos and whats and whys, the three episodes of this series will grip you to the no-longer-surprising but surprisingly unspoilt surprise end!

★★★★☆

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