Kenneth Branagh gives good Poirot, clumsy direction in 'Murder on the Orient Express'

In his withering 1950 essay "The Simple Art of Murder," Raymond Chandler wrote that the solution to Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express" was so far-fetched that "only a half-wit could guess it."

You can sort of see Chandler's point even as he misses it entirely: The joys of reading Christie have nothing to do with outwitting her, let alone holding her to high standards of plausibility, and everything to do with submitting to the befuddlement and ingenuity of her puzzle-box world. Having been blindsided by the ending of "Orient Express" myself, I'm relieved to note that I am clearly no half-wit - or at least, I wasn't when I read the novel as a teenager, a happy