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Instead, we have another middling entry in the Christie film canon. Maybe someone else will take another stab at it in the near future. Other irritating elements pervade “Crooked House,” such as sloppy editing and an obnoxious score, but the film’s greatest sin is that the actual mystery never gains urgency or weight. It’s difficult to assign singular blame for such an issue—it’s possible that the script let the actors down or vice versa, or the direction failed to amplify the writing and the performances—but there’s nevertheless a void at the film’s center that cannot be ignored. Actors like Close and Anderson clearly relish playing their respective characters because they’re just generic enough to allow for unique interpretations, and yet the emotions on display never transcend their broad outlines. Paquet-Brenner disperses new information at a reasonable clip, but no piece of evidence feels even marginally significant, even as misdirection.
Cast & Crew
According to a Morning Consult poll of nearly 10,000 registered voters released last Tuesday and taken in the days after the first trial of a former U.S. president began, Biden slipped ahead of his Republican rival by a single point to lead 44% to 43%, a 3-point swing from just one week earlier. The CNN survey is at odds with other recent polling, which has shown Trump and Biden neck-and-neck as Trump’s support slips among independent voters in any race including former Democrat turned Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Even Biden’s strongest issue approval ratings in the poll are also in negative territory, with 45% approving of his handling of health care policy and 44% approving his handling of student loan debt. And his worst issue approval rating – for his handling of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza – yields 28% approval to 71% disapproval, including an 81% disapproval mark among those younger than 35 and majority disapproval among Democrats,” Agiesta wrote.
Director
'Monday Movies on Main' premieres 'Crooked House' on Jan. 16 presented by SIFF and Old Town Center for the Arts - Verde Independent
'Monday Movies on Main' premieres 'Crooked House' on Jan. 16 presented by SIFF and Old Town Center for the Arts.
Posted: Mon, 11 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Unlike “Orient Express,” however, the inspector in this case is nowhere near as shrewd as Poirot. Played by the handsomely bland Max Irons, Charles Hayward is a former spy turned private eye named who had a brief fling in Cairo some years earlier with Sophia, and whose faint connection to the family might have something to do with his having been chosen to investigate the case. Max Irons plays the young private eye Charles Hayward, who gets a visit in his dingy office from the beautiful Sophia (Stefanie Martini), an old love whose grandfather, an unpopular tycoon, has shuffled off this mortal coil under unusual circumstances. After consulting with the vinegary Scotland Yard hand Chief Inspector Taverner (Terence Stamp, always welcome), Charles sets out to the estate, filled with aunts, sons, in-laws and others, embodied by an all-star cast including Glenn Close, Julian Sands, Gillian Anderson and Christina Hendricks. Ms. Hendricks, her distinctive red hair here a vermilion that borders on magenta, plays an ex-showgirl who is the last wife of the dead old man. The obvious suspects are Brenda Leonides, Aristide's much younger second wife, and Laurence Brown, a conscientious objector who has been living in the house as private tutor to Sophia's younger brother and sister, Eustace and Josephine.
Trump trashes ‘absolute disaster’ White House Correspondents’ Dinner, takes jabs at Colin Jost
Based on an Agatha Christie novel (reportedly one of her own favorites), this mystery is beautifully shot, with great set design, but it suffers from its odd pace. It's too fast to pick up on character nuance and too slow to generate any suspense. Crooked House serves up an entire mansion full of suspects, all of whom appear equally guilty and equally innocent. Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner (Sarah's Key, Dark Places) seems more intent on trying to build a mystery than on building a world populated by characters. Everyone seems placed like a puzzle piece, rather than organically occupying a living space. The novel was adapted for BBC Radio 4 in four weekly 30-minute episodes which began broadcasting on 29 February 2008.
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It starred Rory Kinnear (Charles Hayward), Anna Maxwell Martin (Sophia Leonides), and Phil Davis (Chief Insp. Taverner). The radio play was dramatised by Joy Wilkinson and directed by Sam Hoyle. The title refers to a nursery rhyme ("There Was a Crooked Man"), a common theme of the author. Narrator Charles's fiancée Sophia says it refers not to dishonesty, but rather "we hadn't been able to grow up independent... twisted and twining", meaning unhealthily interdependent on the intensely strong personality of the family patriarch, Aristide Leonides. He searches Edith's garden shed, and finds a bottle of cyanide; also Josephine's missing notebook, buried in quicklime. Taverner arrives to take over the case; he feels Charles's history with Sophia compromises him.
Paquet-Brenner and his two co-writers (including “Gosford Park” screenwriter Julian Fellowes) handle the whodunit reveal at the end fairly well, despite its haphazard staging, but it’s an interminable journey to reach that end point. It’s utterly baffling that the film spends so much time teeing up Hayward’s backstory only to effectively render it irrelevant in the face of the central mystery (I assume this works better on the page). It’s a more understandable decision to foreground the romance between Hayward and Haviland, given that it’s the story’s catalyst and it presents a potential conflict of interest between investigator and suspect, but Irons and Martini have almost no chemistry to speak of and the film conveniently forgets their relationship for long stretches. Contrived tensions between Hayward and Scotland Yard are similarly peppered in for little reason at all. In a series of posts on his Truth Social media platform on Friday night, Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, took aim at both Mr. Kennedy and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, a wealthy Silicon Valley lawyer and investor.
On media pages
Officially, the evening is nonpartisan, and the only toast of the night goes to the sitting president, regardless of party affiliation. Unofficially, the dinner has always been perceived as a hotbed of Washington elites who lean left, regardless of media affiliation. But the president soon dispensed with the yuks and pivoted to what felt like a stump speech about the clear and present danger posed by Trump and his movement. He called on the journalists in the room to report “truth over lies.” He implored them to move past the election horse race stories and focus on American democracy. Certainly Christie's skill comes into play during the final act, as the discovery becomes imminent and the disparate clues that have been scattered about begin to make sense, but until then, it's a thinly spread mess. The movie spends a great deal of time on the history between the detective and young Josephine, but it amounts to almost nothing; it's padding.
Reviewed online, Los Angeles, Dec. 3, 2017. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 115 MIN.
Roger's younger brother, Philip, has suffered under his father's preference for Roger, and retreated into a distant world of books and bygone historical epochs, spending all his waking hours in the library. Philip's wife Magda is an only moderately successful actress to whom everything, even a family murder, is a stage show in which she wants to play a leading part. His twelve-year-old sister Josephine, on the other hand, is ugly, precociously intelligent, and obsessed with detective stories. She spies continually on the rest of the household, letting everyone know that she is writing down her observations in a secret notebook. Three generations of the Leonides family live together under wealthy patriarch Aristide. His first wife Marcia died; her sister Edith has cared for the household since then.
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He was a frequent subject of the roasts by both Biden and the keynote comedians. Pro-Palestinian protesters surrounded the entrance outside of the hotel, shouting chants such as, “Western media, you can’t hide! ” and confronting guests arriving to the dinner in their tuxedos and gowns. Some attendees were followed by tight circles of protesters yelling “Shame! Gosling has previously proven his versatility as a comedic actor in Barbie and The Nice Guys, and it's gratifying to see one of the biggest film stars of our time play an underdog. Underneath some of the banter, the dinner took a somber tone at times.
Appearances by Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All At Once) as Tom's downtrodden assistant and Winston Duke (Black Panther) as Metalstorm's stunt coordinator ups the star power of an already star-studded line-up. Working listlessly as a valet for a Mexican restaurant, Colt is jolted out of his depressive stupor when pugnacious producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) calls him out of the blue with an enticing proposition. A reimagining of the 1981 TV series directed by David Leitch (John Wick, Deadpool 2) — himself a seasoned stunt performer — The Fall Guy is an ode to films and the unsung heroes who make it all happen. The double-edged sword of being a stunt double — the extreme visibility of the death-defying manoeuvres they perform to audiences of millions, the dearth of acknowledgement and the invisibility of their labour — is mined to perfection in The Fall Guy. “My grandfather voted for you in the last election he ever voted in.
They are rumoured to have been carrying on an illicit love affair under old Leonides's nose. The family members hope these two prove to be the murderers because they despise Brenda as a gold digger and also hope to escape the scandal that a different outcome would bring. Charles agrees to help his father, an assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard, to investigate the crime.
She asks Charles to investigate Aristide's death, suspecting that he has been murdered. Charles agrees reluctantly, feeling conflicted due to an earlier a love affair with Sophia in Cairo. Charles seeks the consent of Chief Inspector Taverner of Scotland Yard to look into the case. Trump, who was famously roasted by President Barack Obama at the 2011 dinner, never attended the event as president. His relentless criticism of the mainstream media caused many news organizations to threaten a boycott of the dinner in 2017; Trump announced that he would not attend. He skipped two following years and even counterprogrammed with a MAGA rally instead.
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