Frank Falisi at Crime Reads:
Branagh’s Poirot films occupy an increasingly strange place in the increasingly weird ecosystem: the twenty-first century metroplex. Murder on the Orient Express (2017) entered an economy still starry on the possibilities of IP-mining, as top-grossing films of that year exclusively feature Disney properties and pop culture products as heroes. Death on the Nile (2022) appeared to an industry in the throes of its latest crisis, ravaged both by pandemic-induced closures and delays as well as the burgeoning sense that the terrain of our memories handled at the hands of slick corporate storytelling might not be a sustainable model of cultural dispensation. Indeed, several of the top-grossing films of 2022 feature the same trademarks from five years prior (Batman, Thor, the Minions) while folding in “new” revisitations (Avatar, Top Gun, Puss in Boots). Nile’s release, like so many films shot in the wilderness of late 2019 and early 2020, was pushed and pulled like taffy, a cultural object in search of distribution in an industry increasingly at the mercy of corporate conglomeration, content optimization, and a boring spring towards the moral and artistic middle.
There are the conditions, however reductively summarized, that A Haunting in Venice (2023) enters into.
More here.