Published in 1969, Agatha Christie’s “Hallowe’en Party” is largely set in the fictional town of Woodleigh Common, “an ordinary sort of place,” thirty or forty miles from London. Thanks to the director Kenneth Branagh and his screenwriter, Michael Green, the book has become a new film, “A Haunting in Venice,” and the action has shifted to Italy in 1947. Now, that’s an adaptation—a bolder metamorphosis than anything essayed by Branagh and Green in “Murder on the Orient Express” (2017) or “Death on the Nile” (2022). I’m already looking forward to their next reworking of Christie: “The Body in the Library,” perhaps, relocated to the freezer aisle of a Walmart.
Branagh returns as Hercule Poirot, who has retired to a Venetian fastness. There, ignoring the pleas of the importunate, who bug him with their private mysteries, he tends his garden, inspecting his plants through a magnifying glass as if to expose any guilty aphids. A local heavy named Portfoglio (Riccardo Scamarcio), who sounds like a stockbroker but is actually an ex-cop, functions as a gatekeeper. The one outsider to whom he allows entry is Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), a crime novelist on the make. She urges the sleuth to accompany her to a séance, where a celebrated medium, Mrs. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), will make contact with the beyond. Ariadne’s plan is that Poirot, as an arch-rationalist, will debunk the claims of the paranormal. And Branagh’s plan, as a guileful filmmaker, is to rebunk them to the hilt.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der September 25, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der September 25, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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GREAT MIGRATIONS
\"Home\" and \"What Became of Us.\"
SICK, SAD WORLD
What COVID did to fiction.
MOVE IN FOR THE CULL
The complicated calculus of killing some wild creatures to protect others.
EVERYTHING IN HAND
The C.I.A.'s covert ops have mattered-but not in the way that it hoped.
CHICAGO ON THE SEINE CAMILLE BORDAS
I used to tell myself stories on the job, to make it feel exciting—spy stories, exfiltration stories, war stories. I used to come up with poignant little details that turned the repatriation cases I worked on into “Saving Private Ryan,” into “Johnny Got His Gun.”
A SEMBLANCE OF PEACE
How life in a co-living community changed after October 7th.
HIS BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY
Ye bought a masterpiece by Tadao Ando-and gave it a violent remix.
SCREEN GRAB
How CoComelon conquered children's television.
FOND OF FLAGS
My wife is fond of fast food. I am not. My wife is particularly fond of the Wendy’s Baconator. I argue that it’s less expensive to order a Dave’s Double with a side of bacon, then put your own pretzels on top. (I’m fond of the Rold Gold Tiny Twists Original.)
TROPHY ROOM
Going on safari.