‘Death on the Nile’ Review: Gal Gadot Shines, and Kenneth Branagh Ups His Agatha Christie Game
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticAgatha Christie was born in 1890, and the heyday of movie adaptations of her novels goes quite a ways back (like, 70 or 80 years).
The whole structure and flavor of this sort of delectably engineered whodunit, with its cast of suspects drawn in deliberate broad strokes and its know-it-all detective whose powers of deduction descend directly from Sherlock Holmes, is rooted in the cozy symmetry of the studio-system era.
The last big-screen Christie adaptation that could be considered an all-out success, critically and commercially, was probably Sidney Lumet’s 1974 “Murder on the Orient Express,” a lavishly corny and irresistible amusement in which Albert Finney played the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot as a fussbudget egomaniac with pursed lips and hair that resembled an oil slick (he was like Inspector Clouseau with a brain transplant). “Murder on the Orient Express” was actually an event movie (it received half a dozen Oscar nominations, and Ingrid Bergman even won).
But the Christie adaptations that followed — “Death on the Nile” (1978), “The Mirror Crack’d” (1980), “Evil Under the Sun” (1982) — were half-baked suspense films that felt, collectively, like the fading embers of a genre.
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