Elegantly executed murder mysteries

How do you like your murder mysteries? Are you the sort who leans toward old-fashioned and hokey, or are you among those who prefer the intricacies of psychology and judicial ambiguity? In the former category, it doesn't get more old-fashioned than Agatha Christie, the grand dame of the overly contrived whodunit, and it's amazing that in this day and age of Hollywood anti-creativity a starry reboot of her magnum opus has taken so long.

British director Kenneth Branagh - last behind the camera for Cinderella - has tapped into a potentially billion-dollar franchise with Murder on the Orient Express. A recognizable property with a built-in audience and plenty of room for actors over 50, this iteration of Orient Express is the kind of broad, goofy, lush entertainment that's hard to find fault with. Is it silly? Yes, and it should be. Are the performances hammy? Of course they are. But Branagh and writer Michael Green have managed to blow the dust off a stodgy old property and given it a new life (thanks to younger stars like Daisy Ridley, Leslie Odom Jr., and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) - injecting the story with some uncharacteristic, but welcome, emotion from veterans like Michelle Pfeiffer, Judi Dench and Willem Dafoe.

For the seven people in Hong Kong new to the story, a ride from Istanbul to Calais aboard a luxury train in 1934 turns into a confined manhunt when one of the passengers turns up dead. The world's greatest detective, Belgian Hercule Poirot (also Branagh, with a righteous mustache), must find the killer before the next station. Most of us know how this ends, but Branagh - who's great as the prickly sleuth - combats the familiarity of the material with flawless early century production design and costumes, sweeping Alpine cinematography (by Haris Zambarloukos), a bit more action and a roster of utter pros deftly dishing out anachronistic exclamations. It's like The Avengers for the mature set, and it's no surprise there are plans for a second Poirot film already underway (Death on the Nile).

At the other end of the spectrum is Japanese auteur Hirokazu Koreeda's The Third Murder. Koreeda has made a career of low-key meditations on Japanese complacency and non-confrontational silence, particularly within families (in his breakout Nobody Knows and most recently in After the Storm), but his latest is arguably his most accessible film to date. Oh, he's still meditating, but this time it's on the elusiveness of justice and the nature of truth. After being released from prison for committing a double murder, Takashi Misumi (Koji Yakusho, stellar) is rearrested for the murder of his boss, a decent guy who regularly hired ex-cons to help them out. Staring down the barrel of the death penalty for a third crime, Misumi's lawyer, Tomoaki Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama, also stellar) simply wants to remove capital punishment from the equation in a system rigged for the prosecution. But the only evidence against Misumi is a false confession, which puts the case under more scrutiny and kick-starts a larger conspiracy.

The Third Murder is essentially about the inherent fluidity of truth and perception, and easily has the least courtroom thrills in a courtroom thriller ever produced. In typical Koreeda fashion, the focus is on Misumi and Shigemori's inner lives and the parallels that run between them, elegantly manifest in mirrors and windows in the images that blur the line separating the two men. Ultimately the film is about one man's slow realization of his own personal and moral shortcomings. And despite the careful pacing and lack of courtroom histrionics, Koreeda has also crafted an impeccable mystery with the kind of twists and turns the genre demands - just in a way that's as purely Koreeda as Christie is purely Christie.

(HK Edition 12/01/2017 page10)