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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Still of the Night (1982)

Roy Schneider is a psychiatrist - the sort role Cary Grant plays in a Hitchcock thriller - and Meryl Streep is the blonde femme fatale who comes to him for help when her lover (his patient) is found murdered, in this enjoyable but dopey tv-grade mystery thriller full of attempts at classic Hitchcock thriller moments - a dream sequence, psychobabble, auction-house hijinx - but all delivered in a laughable threadbare plot.

★★★☆☆

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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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Death At An Old Mansion (本陣殺人事件) (1975)

It seems strange to stay completely faithful to the plot of Seishi Yokomizo's detective novel The Honjin Murders yet change the title so no one who has read the book can easily find this adaptation, but I suppose Death At An Old Mansion dispenses with the archaic and unhelpful concept of a honjin and provides a more atmospheric English title better suited to this 1975 adaptation's giallo stylings - in good part a horror movie, chilling at times, but also an effective telling of Yokomizo's classic Japanese locked room murder mystery inspired by Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room.

★★★★☆

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A Haunting In Venice (2023)

With his third Agatha Christie adaptation (the first being Murder On The Orient Express; the second, Death On The Nile) director, lead actor, and likely infatuated-starer-at-self-in-mirrors Kenneth Brannagh delivers another big glossy star vehicle (this one has Tina Fey, terrific as Poirot's mystery novelist friend Ariadne Oliver, and Michelle Yeoh appears) but he again mishandles the all-important mystery, this time transforming Halloween Party into a supernatural horror, forgetting that to solve a mystery Hercule Poirot needs clues, not just to simply float around a crumbly Venetian mansion in extreme close-up; in the end, Brannagh's Poirot looks ridiculous presenting grand revelations magically-gleaned from two clues: flowers and a ringing phone. 

★★★☆☆

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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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Murder by Decree (1979)

There's only one way the Jack the Ripper mystery can be resolved in a movie without history being completely upended, so don't expect too many surprises here, but expect a gripping mystery drama that has Sherlock Holmes (Christopher Plummer, who bewilders with his simpering, "feely" portrayal of the great detective) investigating the notorious Jack the Ripper murders and, once he's talked to, among others, Donald Sutherland's psychic and John Gielgud's parliamentarian, Holmes arrives at a solution that any audience member even half interested in the grisly episode will have come across before.

★★★★☆

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Murder Mystery 2 (2022)

Not as sophisticated a mystery as the plot of a Murder, She Wrote episode, this sequel to Netflix's 2019 Murder Mystery at least improves on that original, generating a few laughs and keeping the pace brisk and the length blessedly short as Nick and Audrey Spitz end up on a tropical island for a wedding where a murderer strikes.

★★☆☆☆

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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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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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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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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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Murder Mystery (2019)

Adam Sandler not acting like a moron and Jennifer Aniston doing what she always does makes for a likeable pair of sleuths here but the writing is so lazy, the murder mystery plot aboard a luxury boat so run-of-the-mill, the assembled suspects (played by a surprising array of big name stars) so lacking in characterisation beyond exaggerated nationality, deformity, or idiosyncracy, and the denouement so underwhelming, so bemusing - in fact so boring - viewers will only continue watching to the end either because they're tied to their chair or because they vainly hope this Netflix offering will dish up a final twist or surprise or something, anything!, to unlock the great mystery: how Netflix sustains its subscription service when it serves up dross like this so lazily thrown together you almost suspect it has been released unfinished.

★☆☆☆☆

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Laura (1944)

Like Hitchcock's Rebecca released four years earlier, the title character of this Otto Preminger-directed mystery thriller, Laura, casts a spell over everyone and like Rebecca, she's dead at the movie's outset but nonetheless presides over every scene, particularly as there is a portrait of her that watches over her apartment where Dana Andrew's detective, a man in a fedora who calls women 'dames' (for this is pessimistic film noir, not Du Maurier's romantic thriller) is investigating Laura's murder at the hands of one of her society friends.

★★★★☆

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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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