Murder on the Orient Express

Murder on the Orient Express (2017) is adapted from Agatha Christie's 1934 novel, one of the books that set the rules of its genre. A train out of Istanbul is stopped by snow. A passenger is found stabbed. Hercule Poirot is aboard, along with twelve suspects. Everyone has a witness and an alibi. The novel's idea is that Christie takes the closed circle murder puzzle and carries its solution outside what the genre expects. Reading or watching it without knowing is a genuinely different experience, so we are not describing it here. The book's starting point was a real case: the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby in America in 1932. Christie wrote the novel two years later and the history behind the murder in it rests on that. Kenneth Branagh directs and plays Poirot. The moustache was the most discussed thing on release, defended as faithful to Christie's description. Sidney Lumet filmed the same novel in 1974, and Albert Finney's Poirot is treated as the benchmark; comparison is unavoidable. The cast is large and full of stars, which is also the novel's own tradition. It runs 114 minutes. Good for: classic mystery, Agatha Christie, and period films. Less good for: anyone who has heard the solution has largely lost the film, and there are too many characters for all of them to register.