A Haunting In Venice is about as chilling as your average caffe latte: BRIAN VINER savages Kenneth Branagh’s new film

A Haunting In Venice (12A, 103 minutes)

Verdict: Clunky melodrama 

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Bolan’s Sneakers (15, 95 minutes) 

Verdict: Platform for excellence

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The query that shimmered over Kenneth Branagh’s final film adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel, 2022’s Dying On The Nile, was not a lot whodunnit as why-make-it?

It wasn’t as if his first effort, Homicide On The Orient Categorical (2017), was a lot cop. Really, to be extra correct, it was an excessive amount of cop. Because the mighty Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, Branagh scarcely appeared to go away the display, ‘amming up ze accent for all he was value and relentlessly scattering aitches by means of his extravagant facial hair.

That very same why-make-it poser swirls much more conspicuously round his new one, A Haunting In Venice.

The multi-layered moustache is again, totally deserving a credit score of its personal, however I am unable to think about Christie followers loving all of the liberties Branagh and screenwriter Michael Inexperienced take with the good Dame’s 1969 story Hallowe’en Get together. Of those, essentially the most whopping is the shift of setting from the genteel (if considerably accident-prone) fictional English village of Woodleigh Widespread to a spooky Venetian palazzo.

Since it is also arduous to see the movie interesting to those that aren’t followers of Christie, that just about accounts for your entire cinema-going demographic.

I suppose there is likely to be a 3rd set of punters who do not a lot care by some means about Christie however relish a great supernatural thriller filled with soar scares. But Branagh tries so arduous with these scares — doorways banging, chandeliers plummeting, parrots screeching, ghosts looming — that they swiftly grow to be about as chilling as your common caffe latte.

Because it occurs, I noticed A Haunting In Venice with my pal Tony, and afterwards we went for dinner in a Chinese language restaurant the place we had been busily discussing the movie’s frailties when the waiter appeared to materialise from nowhere and requested in a loud, rasping voice whether or not we had been able to order. For the primary time all night, we each jumped out of our skins.

Nonetheless, in equity to Branagh, Venice is not a foul backdrop for a creepy story and his movie carries some distinct echoes of Nic Roeg’s 1973 traditional Do not Look Now. His mistake, metaphorically, is to over-egg the zabaglione.

Many of the motion takes place within the creepy palazzo, stated to accommodate an historic curse known as ‘the youngsters’s vendetta’. But it surely’s not as if, to swerve the youngsters’s vendetta, you’ll be able to simply leg it subsequent door. In keeping with Poirot’s lugubrious Italian bodyguard, each dwelling in Venice is claimed to be both ‘haunted or cursed’. Heck, not even Woodleigh Widespread is that unfortunate.

The wily previous super-sleuth wants a bodyguard as a result of, though because the movie begins he has retired, he’s nonetheless comically besieged by people wanting him to resolve their mysteries. It’s 1947 and Venice, charmingly generally known as La Serenissima, has her most romantic face on, with not an overpriced glass trinket or chubby American cruise-shipper to be seen.

Poirot has no intention of getting again to work till his American crime-novelist buddy Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) turns as much as inform him that Venice is not the one ‘beautiful relic slowly sinking into the ocean’. His good thoughts, she says cattily, is at risk of doing the identical.

She needs him to debunk a psychic, Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), who has been engaged by a grieving mom, Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), to contact her lifeless daughter, Alicia. However as you might need guessed, that is not the half of it. Did Alicia kill herself or was she got rid of?

There is a housekeeper, Olga (Camille Cottin), who appears to know greater than she’s letting on, whereas the household physician, Dr Ferrier (Jamie Dornan), is a suspiciously unstable fellow evidently able to something. Coping with post-traumatic points after serving to to liberate Belsen on the finish of the struggle, he is a continuing fear to his precocious son Leopold (Jude Hill, who additionally performed Dornan’s son in Branagh’s pleasant 2021 autobiographical movie Belfast).

Poirot duly attends Mrs Reynolds’ seance, at which somebody is murdered. Then another person comes a cropper. And a sinister masked determine tries to drown our hirsute hero in an apple-bobbing bucket. Did I neglect to say it is Halloween, and by now, Branagh is admittedly ramping up the melodrama.

There is a storm raging open air and Poirot getting jolly stern indoors, declaring that till he finds out who the killer is, ‘nobody shall go away zis place’. In reality, it is a message no less than as ominous for these of us within the cinema as for these within the forged.

Bolan’s Sneakers, made for a fraction of the funds of A Haunting In Venice, feels twice as genuine. At first, as we’re whisked again to 1976, to a gaggle of energetic children from a Liverpool youngsters’s residence travelling by coach to a Marc Bolan gig, the movie appears harking back to 2019’s Blinded By The Gentle, a frothy feelgood image impressed by the music of Bruce Springsteen.

The titular inspiration right here is Bolan, his band T-Rex and his spangly platform footwear, however truly they’re all fairly peripheral to the principle narrative, which springs from the coach crashing disastrously on the best way residence (a 12 months earlier than Bolan himself misplaced his life in a motor accident).

With occasional flits again in time, a lot of the story unfolds within the current day, when Jimmy, the Twentieth-century boy as soon as blamed for the coach crash, turns up in maturity, sensitively performed by Timothy Spall as each epileptic and bipolar.

Leanne Greatest is particularly terrific as one other of the crash survivors, Penny, who’s now married to a delicate Anglesey vicar however whose reunion with Jimmy powers the remainder of the movie.

The author and director, higher generally known as an actor (he was Owen Armstrong in Coronation Road for 5 years), is Ian Puleston-Davies. Hats off to him for a movie that’s darkish in some ways however, finally, when you’ll forgive my very own indirect glam-rock reference, positively candy.

The Nettle Gown (12A, 68 minutes)

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Most of us know one thing about foraging for meals within the wild, however not a lot about foraging for garments.

Dylan Howitt’s participating documentary The Nettle Gown follows a delicate English eccentric known as Allan Brown who, after amassing the uncooked supplies within the East Sussex countryside, units out to make a costume, because the title implies, from nettles.

This extraordinary, intensive course of takes seven years, throughout which period Brown’s spouse Alex is identified with terminal most cancers aged solely 45, and dies.

So his mission, supported by his quite a few youngsters, turns into an especially shifting labour of affection and loss.

He’s struck by the distinction between the plant’s belligerent fame as a supply of nasty stings (greater than justified in my expertise) and the ‘smooth, silky’ fibres that may be spun from it; certainly he likens the ‘sensual’ weaving course of to ‘combing the hair of your lover’.

The ultimate product is a form of Viking-era costume, cheerfully modelled by one among his daughters, which may swimsuit an additional on Recreation Of Thrones.

I am unsure that ‘hedgerow couture’ will catch on, however this lyrical movie provides a beguiling introduction.