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A Haunting
In Venice

Director – Kenneth Branagh – 2023 – UK – Cert. 12a – 103m

**

Hercule Poirot’s exposure of a fake medium at a séance in Venice turns into a trail of mayhem and murder in which he must unmask the killer – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 15th

Kenneth Branagh’s latest adaptation of an Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot story starts off well enough, with Poirot (Branagh) visited by old friend Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey, who lights up the screen and is given or perhaps invents for herself all the best lines) who, like him, is convinced that all mediums who preside over séances are fakes. But the latest medium she has encountered appears to be genuine, which is to say that she’s sure the medium a fake, but can’t work out for the life of her how the medium is pulling it off. So she wants Poirot to accompany her to a séance, witness the medium first hand and work out how she’s doing it.

She gets him into a party for orphaned children at a troubled building where a young woman named Alicia drowned some time ago. She was the daughter of the current occupant, retired opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Middle Man

Director – Bent Hamer – 2021 – Norway, Denmark, Canada, UK, Germany, Switzerland – Cert. 15 – 95m

****

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but… A man in a heartland American town becomes a middle man, whose job it is to convey bad news to local people – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 10th

Curiously for an English language film set in a small American town, this one was funded by a variety of European countries and Canada. While its visuals clearly owe much to the films of David Lynch, particularly Blue Velvet (1986) and Lost Highway (1997) with their heavy night time interiors filled with dark, impenetrable black spaces, it eschews the over the top moments of sex and violence with which Lynch peppers these films with something much less jocular and more deadpan. Like Lynch it feels distinctly odd, yet in a completely different way. Unlike those films, it’s adapted from (part of) a novel.

Opening images. Factories in a town belch smoke. A small, industrial town on a river. This is Karmack, USA.

Frank Farrelli (Pål Sverre Hagen) is the second interviewee by the three person panel (the local sheriff, pastor and doctor played respectively by Paul Gross, Nicholas Bro and Canadian regular Don McKellar) for the town’s job of middle man, the person who has to deliver bad news, e.g.… Read the rest