Ten to sen (aka 'Points and Lines' or 'Point and Line') (点と線) (1958)

Seiichi Matsumoto's mystery, a mere slip of a book written in the spare style of Simenon, is in some ways the counter to Hitchcock's A Lady Vanishes - instead of disappearing from a train, here one character steadfastly appears on one while detectives suspect he was elsewhere - but to say more would ruin the surprise of both the book and this faithful 1958 adaptation that opens with a Vertigo-style animated journey across the points and lines of a train map set to a jaunty discordant thriller score, barrels like an express train through its mystery, and ends with a solution to an impossible crime as ingenious as it is simple, hinging on a trick that is uniquely Japanese - there'll never be a Western adaptation! 

★★★★★

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Island of Hell (aka 'Devil's Island', 'Gokumon-tou', 'Hell's Gate Island' (獄門島) (1977)

Ichikawa Kon's 1977 adaptation of Seishi Yokomizo's detective novel is faithful to the book except in its final moments when whodunnit is revealed and it is whodidntdunnit in the book, a change which will rankle fans of the classic mystery featuring the recurring, dandruff-suffering, scruffy detective Kindaichi Kousuke; meanwhile, non-Japanese speakers also will be frustrated by breakneck cutting, which makes it hard to enjoy the movie's Japanese sets, costuming, and its plot while also keeping up with lightning-speed subtitles. 

★★★☆☆

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Clue: The Movie (1985)

The actors are about as animated and have as much personality as the boardgame's character cards and it disconcerts that they are not the colours they are supposed to be — Mrs Peacock has feathers but is brown and Mrs White isn't the cook but a black-clad Goth — and the stage sets very wearily, like at the start of a board game when noone is sure of the rules, but stick with the carry-on because there are some laughs to be had towards the end as the initially easily shocked troupe grows increasingly unfazed by all the murders happening around them while Tim Curry grows increasingly irreverent as Wadsworth the butler of the Cluedo mansion.

★★☆☆☆

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Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)

The inferior sequel to Knives Out tries to repeat the same tricks, cutting back and forwards in time to interject scenes that upend what we thought we knew of the developing mystery (this time set on a tech billionaire's hi-tech Greek island where guests have gathered for a murder mystery weekend) but like that murder mystery weekend, which Daniel Craig's nondescript Benoit Blanc abruptly ends by prematurely solving it, so too is the movie's main mystery - the murder of one of the guests - abruptly over, solved within an hour of starting, and all the jumping back and forth between past and present, the crowdpleasing techpreneur teardown, and jarring celebrity cameos can't disguise how brief and empty it is.

★★☆☆☆

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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Enola Holmes 2

In this sequel, Enola sets up a detective agency and investigates the disappearance of a girl from a London match factory, which is not a plot from Nancy Springer's books, apparently, but a new story written specially for this sequel that puts Springer's character front and centre in an actual historic union uprising - the rousing girl-power of the original movie is matched only at the very end after much long-windedness.

★★★☆☆

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Maigret's Night At The Crossroads (2017)

Perhaps Rowan Atkinson was trying here to present an especially sad Maigret given the story opens upon the funeral of a police colleague, but he is so flat, so deadpan, so morose - even more so than usual - that this episode of the usually thrilling 2016 and 2017 Maigret series is the rather flat and ponderous one of the four - at some points you wonder if the actors are speaking as slowly as they are just to try to stretch the story to movie-length and this lethargic pacing is at odds with the outlandish characters, one of them scarred and hissing like a Bond villain and another a stammering cartoon who do not fit well against the backdrop of gritty Paris and its mid-50s period detail.

★★☆☆☆

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True Detective (Season 2)

True Detective Season 2 (DVD

True Detective Season 2 (DVD)

Season 2 centres around the murder of a city planner in California and confirms True Detective as an anthology series about twisted murders committed by masked culprits, investigated by deeply flawed police officers - here, three, all deeply, deeply cracked - who engage in a massive shootout in about episode 5, and like the first season, this one is star-studded (Rachel McAdams, Taylor Kitsch, Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn star), is cinematic, but is let down by the ponderousness of its first four episodes, by its overreaching scope (cults and gay shame and extramarital affairs and adoption and sexual harrassment counselling sessions are just some of the extraneous matters that keep things mindbogglingly busy) and it is also let down by the pure (daytime) soapiness of scenes between Vince Vaughn's Frank, a club owner up to his neck in corruption and crime, and his wife, Jordan, his business partner and wannabe-bearer of his child.

★★★☆☆

True Detective (Season 1)

True Detective Season 1 (DVD)

True Detective Season 1 (DVD)

Two cops, Matthew McConaughey's Rustin "Rusty" Cohle and Woody Harrelson's Martin Hart investigate the ritualistic killing of a prostitute in this gritty eight-episode police procedural that distinguishes itself with its bleak view of human psychology - as bleak as any of its Louisiana backwater crime scenes - and with the false promise of its title: that this has anything to do with pulpy True Detective-style magazines or tells a crime story that is even slightly realistic. 

★★★★☆

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The Limestone Golem (2016)

We all love Bill Nighy, but his frozen-with-botox, duck-lipped routine as Detective Kildare in this Victorian-era serial killer thriller (based on a book, apparently) gets more than tired, and when a *shocking* revelation comes at the end - one that might make sense if you cared to think about it - he delivers one final, extended stare of such ridiculous duck-lipped intensity that you want to scream as though a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer called the Limestone Golem is upon you.

★★☆☆☆

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Detective Dee and the Four Heavenly Kings (狄仁杰之四大天王) (2018)

Like 2013s Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon, this third Tsui Hark-directed Detective Dee movie is a prequel to 2010s Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame and again involves the titular character, Di Renjie (an actual Tang Dynasty historical figure embellished with Sherlockian powers of deduction) investigating a gong'an crime - a crime steeped in the supernatural that ultimately looks like threatening the life of the Emperor - and it is clearly meant to be a bigger and better blockbuster than the previous movies and boy does it feature some spectacularly realised bad guys, but ultimately this wuxia costume drama ends up suffering 'the curse of the third movie' with the drive to be bigger and better coming at the expense of a sensible ending.

★★★☆☆

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The Scarlet Claw (1944)

The opening credits attribute the "original" story to a pair of plagiarists, suggesting they've only based their plot on the characters of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but anyone can see the debt this eighth of the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies owes The Hound of the Baskervilles with its murder on the foggy moors committed by a phosphorescent monster; however, before you groan at having watched it all before, remember Basil Rathbone in black-and-white is Sidney Paget's illustrations come-to-life, and here Holmes - on the hunt for a villain as diabolical as any seen in cinema to 1944 - becomes involved in some deliciously creepy scenes including one so good it was used again by Scorsese in his Cape Fear 47 years later.

★★★★☆

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Maigret In Montemartre (2017)

One of two movie-length episodes in the 2017 second season of the Rowan Atkinson-helmed adaptations of Georges Simenon's Maigret stories, this one, based on 'Maigret And The Strangled Stripper', is another rivetting crime melodrama set in a terrifically realised gritty 1950s Paris full of morphine-addled prostitutes, rent boys, showgirls and grubby bohemes, and I think it again terrifically captures the feel of Simenon's spare writing and I think Rowan Atkinson is Maigret leapt-to-life from Simenon's pages. 

★★★★☆

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Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (狄仁杰之通天帝国) (2010)

It may disappoint Western audiences hoping for the big budget magic realism of Hero, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, etc, but despite its not quite so sumptuous staging, Detective Dee is a solidly entertaining mystery adventure, like a Chinese-Hong Kong Young Sherlock Holmes with its intriguing mystery of people bursting into flames in ancient China, a mystery investigated by historically real but embellished Tang Dynasty official Renjie 'Detective Dee' Di.

★★★★☆

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