Pru's boo reviews: 'A Haunting in Venice' – The Appalachian

Kenneth Branagh’s third Agatha Christie adaptation, “A Haunting in Venice,” has arrived and Branagh is back as Detective Hercule Poirot in his creepiest caper yet. The film is adapted from Christie’s 1969 Poirot novel “Hallowe’en Party,” and its atmosphere is appropriately spooky. The canals of Venice are filled with bird-masked boatmen, mist-shrouded docks and a murder plot. The year is 1947, and Hercule Poirot is pulled out of retirement while attending a Halloween party gone violently awry. It’s a fine set-up for a classic whodunnit. There’s a gaggle of suspect party guests, including recent Academy Award-winner Michelle Yeoh as Joyce Reynolds, a crooked medium. The seance she and her associates have cooked up is the rationale for getting the party together; Poirot is there as a favor to his old friend Ariadne Oliver, an out-of-vogue mystery writer looking to chronicle a genuine supernatural thrill. Oliver, played by the never-wittier Tina Fey, needs Poirot there as a safety, trusting his powers of perception to confirm the fact or fiction of Reynolds’ commune with the dead.  However, Poirot’s best efforts to reveal the parlor tricks Reynolds is employing are fruitless. The seance comes to a head with Reynolds seemingly possessed by the
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