He solved a Murder on the Orient Express. He got to the bottom of a Death on the Nile. A Haunting in Venice, though, may finally be a match for Hercule Poirot and his little grey cells in Kenneth Branagh’s third starry helping of Agatha Christie mystery.
Director-star-producer Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green stuck with the tried and tested for the first two instalments of what has now become a trilogy of vehicles for the former’s take on Christie’s canny Belgian. (Both and were famously filmed in the 1970s, with Albert Finney, however, they have gone decidedly off-piste, opting instead to adapt a far more obscure entry in the canon: 1969’s , a country-house whodunnit of middling repute whose most noteworthy feature – beside a cameo from Ariadne Oliver, a fictional writer of detective stories generally considered to be Aggie’s alter ego – is the affectionate dedication it contains to author P.G. Wodehouse.
