Kenneth Branagh Archives - MovieManifesto

A Haunting in Venice: The Ghost of the Town

September 22, 2023September 21, 2023 Jeremy BeckReviews

Just what kind of genius is Hercule Poirot? Six years ago, in his remake of Murder on the Orient Express, Kenneth Branagh reimagined Agatha Christie’s famous detective as a man obsessed with balance; his gift for crime-solving derived from his preternatural ability to recognize when clues and alibis didn’t line up. In his two ensuing movies—first the forgettable Death on the Nile, now the somewhat-improved Haunting in Venice—Branagh seems to have abandoned this conceit, instead depicting his super-sleuth as a quasi-scientist who unravels mysteries through the rigorous application of “order and method.” He isn’t some sort of deductive wizard; he just pays attention.

This doesn’t make Poirot an especially interesting character, but it does function as a handy metaphor for Branagh’s own filmmaking. The traps inherent in the murder-mystery picture—the isolated location, the assemblage of suspects, the cheap twists and red herrings, the destination overshadowing the journey—are difficult to evade. This time out, Branagh doesn’t so much avoid them as skillfully blunt their impact. His version of “order and method” is to deploy familiar cinematic tools in order to bring energy and flair to a production whose narrative bones are dusty and creaky. A Haunting in Venice doesn’t exactly revive this moldy skeleton, but it does clothe it in alluring imagery and spooky atmosphere. Read More

Belfast: The Troubles of Growing Up, Like and Unlike Everyone Else

November 19, 2021November 19, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews

Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds, Jude Hill, and Judi Dench in Belfast

The opening scene of Belfast, the new film from Kenneth Branagh, announces the movie as both a narrow slice-of-life comedy and a more ambitious historical drama. Following some trivial narration from Judi Dench, the wan colors shift into crisp black-and-white, and the camera glides along a street in Northern Ireland, revealing a homey, intimate neighborhood. (A title card informs us that the date is August 1969.) The mood is relaxed and cheerful; children are kicking a ball around, adults are yammering idly, and everyone seems to know everybody’s name. Yet as nine-year-old Buddy (newcomer Jude Hill) traverses the road and spars good-naturedly with some shopkeepers, this peaceful idyll is shattered by the sudden arrival of armed hooligans. As they snarl threats and smash windows, the camera pivots around Buddy, spinning faster and faster, underlining his vulnerability and panic. What was once bliss has been replaced by terror.

Roughly based on Branagh’s own childhood, Belfast is a noble, enjoyable, not entirely successful attempt to document both sides of this formative coin. It seeks to frame the traditional hallmarks of the coming-of-age picture—the fledgling romances, the quixotically striving parents, the classroom grievances, the petty illegalities—against the backdrop of social unrest and religious conflict. That it struggles to fuse these disparate halves into a cohesive whole is due less to tonal inconsistency than cinematic execution, or maybe priorities. Over the course of a long and uneven career, Branagh has proved himself capable of working on a large scale—I remain a fan of his straitlaced Hamlet, while the operatic thriller Dead Again is arguably his best work—but here, whether because of lack of interest or inadequate filmmaking chops, he fails to invest the movie’s ostensibly sweeping commentary with much energy or clarity. He’s more committed to evoking the particular pleasures and predicaments of his youth with loving detail and misty-eyed nostalgia. Read More

Murder on the Orient Express: To Catch a Killer, with Instincts and Interviews

November 17, 2017May 7, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews

Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot in "Murder on the Orient Express"

The concept of a whodunit set on a train carries with it a tantalizing geometric contradiction. Trains are rigid vehicles, traveling robotically along a designated pathway with no room for deviation or improvisation. Mysteries, by contrast, zig and zag, circling around and doubling back along pronged avenues of key clues, red herrings, and dramatic twists. Murder on the Orient Express, Kenneth Branagh’s sleek but staid transliteration of Agatha Christie’s much-adapted novel, seeks to mine the tension inherent in this incongruity, lumping a dozen-odd suspects and one dead body inside the claustrophobic confines of an immobilized caravan. It’s a suspenseful setting, but it serves as scaffolding for a disappointingly bloodless and familiar story. You know the drill: Everyone is a suspect, nobody can be trusted, and freighted expository flashbacks are just around the bend.

Our conductor on this less-than-thrilling ride is Kenneth Branagh, the stately Irish actor who often moonlights as a mercurial director. (In addition to a number of Shakespeare productions, he has helmed a Marvel movie, a Tom Clancy adventure, and updates of both Frankenstein and Cinderella.) He pulls double duty here, showcasing his knack for filming panoramic vistas while also hamming it up as Hercule Poirot, Christie’s famous and ingenious detective. (Previously essayed on the big screen by both Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov, Poirot is probably most recognizable in the form of David Suchet, who played the sleuth for 24 years on British TV.) Donning a flamboyant Belgian accent and a mesmerizing handlebar mustache that a taxidermist must have pruned from Kurt Russell’s exhumed Hateful Eight corpse, Branagh’s Poirot is a savant who, much like Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, is not especially modest about his own intellect. “I am probably the greatest detective in the world,” he declares to a roomful of gobsmacked observers; one suspects he added the adverb as a mere courtesy. Read More

Ranking 2014’s Movies: #s 92-79

January 5, 2015March 4, 2021 Jeremy BeckFeatures

George Clooney and Hugh Bonneville in The Monuments Men

According to the calendar, 2014 is over, but the Manifesto tends to operate on its own time. Ideally, this would be the point where we’d unveil our top 10 list, highlighting the very best that the prior year in cinema had to offer. The problem, however, is that 2014 hasn’t really ended yet, at least not in moviegoing terms. There are still a number of high-profile releases that technically came out last month (making them eligible for the upcoming Oscars) but that have yet to screen near me, including Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, and J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year. Given that these movies are all receiving considerable acclaim, it would be premature for me to present a finalized top 10 list without giving them a chance. So instead, I’m going to present a list of… everything else.

What follows is a ranked list, in ascending order of quality, of every 2014 theatrical release I’ve seen. I need not remind you that this exercise is profoundly ludicrous. Certainly, some movies are better than others, but just as certainly, attempting to slot different works of art into an inflexible hierarchy is absurd. But it does provide me an opportunity to go on record with my thoughts on all of the movies I saw last year, and unlike the Manifesto’s foolhardy Review of 2013, it allows me to do so in a matter of days rather than months. Just remember that these rankings are highly amorphous, and that if I re-made this list a week from now, the specific order would be highly jumbled, even if the general shape remained the same.