Little Grey Celluloid: Some Thoughts on Poirot in Film (and TV)

From Albert Finney to Sir Kenneth Branagh (and, of course, David Suchet), the screen legacy of Hercule Poirot is a storied one.

Of all Christie’s detective novels, Murder on the Orient Express perhaps lends itself best to a blockbuster: it promises grand set-pieces, an opulent train cutting through rugged, snow-capped scenery, and a neatly contained roster of suspects ripe for starry casting.…

REVIEW: The Last Sacrifice

England still likes to remember itself its B&W heyday: BBC newsreels narrated in perfect RP, thatched cottages, fields rolling merrily into eternity.

Rupert Russell’s The Last Sacrifice starts inside that bucolic dream — and then slashes it open.

On Valentine’s Day, 1945, on Meon Hill, Warwickshire, elderly farm labourer Charles Walton was found murdered with his own tools; pinned to the earth with a pitchfork, his neck slashed by a billhook.…

REVIEW: Frankenstein (LFF 2025)

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is a film of exquisite surfaces.

Every frame glows with painterly attention: the flicker of candlelight on stitched flesh, a crimson-lacquered angel, a rider frozen mid-gallop in a snowbound tableau. It’s as if Del Toro has built an anatomical model of Frankenstein – every bone polished, every vein visible – but forgotten to breathe full life into it.…

REVIEW: Hamnet (LFF 2025)

We all know how it ends.

That’s the strange power of Hamnet – its inevitability.

The film, directed by Chloé Zhao, adapted by her and Maggie O’Farrell’s from O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel, begins beneath the shadow of this foreknowledge: Shakespeare’s young son will die, and from that death will come the greatest tragedy in English literature.…

REVIEW: Wake Up Dead Man – A Knives Out Mystery (LFF 2025)

Its title sounds like a declaration of an in-built twist, but Wake Up Dead Man, Rian Johnson’s latest addition to the Knives Out universe, has loftier ambitions in mind.

After the classic manor-house intrigue of the original Knives Out and the sunlit, self-refractive satire of its sequel, Glass Onion, we find ourselves in the isolated parish our Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, in Chimney Rock, upstate New York.…

REVIEW: Mickey 17

Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s latest, is a Frankenstein’s Monster of a movie, but one that fails to come to life.

Our titular iterative protagonist, hapless sad-sack Mickey (Robert Pattinson; endearing, like a naïfish Looney Tune), discovers that intergalactic travel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, when he realises he’s signed up to be an Expendable.…

REVIEW: Nosferatu (2024)

Robert Eggers’ remake of F.W Murnau’s prototypical horror classic is a gothic fever dream of carnal obsession and spiritual repulsion.

Winter, 1838: Estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult; acquitting himself as the thwarted hero) departs Wisborg, Germany. His destination is the castle of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård; essaying another classic movie monster), his firm’s mysterious new client, in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania.…