ignatiusloyala

Murder on the Orient Express will make Agatha Christie turn in her coffin: this adaptation resembles nothing she wrote and it would have been fine if significant revision had resulted in something good but in this case it has not.

Standing on the back of a successful adaptation starring Albert Finney, it is understandable that the producer wanted to make this version different to avoid direct comparison. However, remaking Poirot as a character does not work, not when the character is already so established - Branagh's Belgian detective is emotional, lacks cool, sulky and dull, i.e. he does not look in any way like Christie's Poirot. By way of comparison, Sherlock gives us a new Holmes too, but the classic and modern Sherlock still share some likeness to which audience can relate.

More importantly, Sherlock retains logic in its storytelling, as opposed to Murder on the Orient Express, where Poirot's solution of the case seems heaped upon speculations. They might not have been speculations - as the book has all the clues - but this adaptation leaves out a lot of information essential for solving the case. As a minor spoiler, not all passengers were interviewed and one wonders how Poirot came to guess so many things right. Add all these to the phony ending, and you have a star-studded whodunit murdered by a disastrously poor script.

Hollywood should stop Woody Allen producing movies if he is to recycle his genres over and over and over again.

'To Rome With Love' is a clichéd Woody Allen piece with his hackneyed signatures like multi-layered love stories, couples that came together due to accidents and a babbling, irritating Woody Allen in whichever boring roles he wrote for himself - that last bit has not changed a bit since Annie Hall and man, that was over 30 years ago.

While the film has moments of brilliance, the odd but banal plot does not save the day: Alec Baldwin's part was cheesy and awkward, and one wonders why his younger companions were not annoyed by his presence; what happened to Benigni was left unexplained - in a way it needs no explanation but it sounds ridiculous from the beginning - leaving one feeling somewhat disconnected to the story. In fact, all the stories are not connected, but it is not like Paris Je T'aime where the audience knows it contains unrelated stories. At times, I feel that Woody Allen was trying to make the stories stick together but failed. The incoherence has created such distance between the plot and the audience that the whole film looks like nothing more than a showcase of brilliant actors whose only job was to be beautiful in Rome.