Review: Murder on the Orient Express (film)

Name: Murder on the Orient Express
Based on: The novel by Agatha Christie
Starring: Kenneth Branagh, Michelle Pfeiffer, Johnny Depp, Judi Dench
Released: 2017

Murder on the Orient Express is the perfect cinematic spectacle to catch as we dive headlong into winter. Weather-wise, its full of snow. I was one of the few people (it seems) who didn't know the ending before watching the film, which I think made it more enjoyable.



This poster was created specially for
the film by New York illustrator
Johnny Dombrowski. See Inside
The Rock Poster Frame blog
to get your hands on one. 

Hercule Poirot (Branagh) is looking forward to a long overdue holiday when he is compelled to take on a murder case in London. Thankfully, he meets his old friend Bouc in Istanbul, who makes room for the famous Poirot on his train – the luxurious Orient Express where guests travel across Europe in style.

So twelve strangers gather aboard the train for the three-day journey. All they have in common is their ability to afford the expensive ticket. The motley crew – including a shady art dealer, a violent dancer, a rude princess and an American woman in search of husband number three – are thrown into disarray when one of them is killed in the sanctity of their train cabin. They're all suspects and the murderer could, of course, strike again.

Murder on the Orient Express is a classic story that has been continuously retold. And for good reason. It includes money and a love affair, as my Welsh friend put it, but more than that, it takes a long, hard look at the wide moral gap between right and wrong, and the ways in which the human soul can fracture.

In my opinion, as well as being a snowy spectacle, Murder on
the Orient Express is good old-fashioned entertainment, with great performances from some of Hollywood's finest. The film took a little while to get going, but then it moved at quite a pace – unlike the train they were stranded on. (Sorry.) I enjoyed figuring out whodunit, and now would like to forget the whole thing entirely so that I can pick up the book in a few years' time and experience it afresh as Agatha would have wanted.

Review: Love in a Cold Climate (TV)

Name: Love in a Cold Climate

Starring: Rosamund Pike, Elisabeth Dermot Walsh, Megan Dodds, Javier Alcina

Length: 2 hours 30 mins, over two episodes

Year: 2002

I’ve cheated! Love in a Cold Climate is still on my to-read list, but it is also on Netflix. After a busy weekend earlier this month, I conked out on the sofa, tuned into this mini-series and made a Christmas pom-pom.

The BBC adaptation of Love in a Cold Climate

Three upper-class girls in the 1930s are looking for love, and maybe even marriage. After a fairly dowdy coming-out ball, things start to get interesting for them. Our narrator, Fanny (Rosamund Pike), is constantly being compared to her mother, the infamous ‘Bolter’, a woman of – shall we say – a loose moral persuasion, according to the rigid standards of the time. I read about a real-life Bolter a few years ago in a book by Francis Osborne, and Idina Sackville was apparently the inspiration for Fanny's mother.

Polly, Fanny’s beautiful friend, has to endure ball after ball while her snobbish mother, Lady Montdore, waxes lyrical over her daughter’s apparent ambivalence to romance. It is Polly who questions, on returning from Imperial India, how love will differ in a cold climate. The secrets of her heart are revealed when she marries her uncle, her mother’s lover, the promiscuous ‘Boy’, scandalising society and officially cutting ties with the outraged Lady Montdore.

Fanny’s cousin, Linda (Elizabeth Dermot Walsh), defies her father by marrying a German man, and in doing so appears to fall on her feet, having both of the boxes ‘marriage’ and ‘love’ ticked. That is, until it goes pear-shaped when Linda’s head and heart are turned by a communist speaker in Hyde Park. Her story was my favourite, as her pursuit of true love takes her around the world and back again, ending in England during the Blitz.

This TV adaptation combines both Love in a Cold Climate and Pursuit of Love, so I’m not one hundred percent sure where one story began and the other ended. All the more reason to read the books! The show was pacy and depicted the girls' spirit as they navigated life, love and society in the changing world between the wars. The characters around them were eccentric and not always that likeable, which made Fanny, Polly and Linda all the more endearing.

One for a rainy Sunday afternoon!