Film reviews: Death on the Nile | The Sky is Everywhere

Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile PIC: Rob Youngson / © 2020 Twentieth Century Fox

Death on the Nile (12A) ***

The Sky is Everywhere (N/R) ****

Flee (15) ****

Having set-up Death on the Nile with his 2017 box-office hit Murder on the Orient Express, Kenneth Branagh kicks off this latest adventure for Agatha Christie’s intrepid Hercule Poirot in unexpectedly virtuosic fashion. Going all Paths of Glory with a black-and-white tracking shot through the trenches of a First World War battlefield, he provides an absorbing backstory for the Belgian super-sleuth (once again played by Branagh) that also functions as an origins story for the ridiculous moustache that became such a focal point of the first film.

That the first film was a rather weak update of one of Christie’s most famous murder mysteries didn’t bode well for a follow-up. Nor did the subsequent reinvention of the genre that came courtesy of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, a film that left Branagh’s movie looking even more like an airless pastiche. But although Death on the Nile isn’t in the Knives Out league, as a Christie adaptation it’s a much more fun update, with the aforementioned opening giving Branagh more to play with in his interpretation of the obsessive detective, and the story’s Egyptian paddle steamer providing a more exotic locale for the unfurling crimes.

Gal Cadot leads the large supporting cast as a wealthy heiress whose recent marriage is the occasion for a group of disgruntled friends, family members and staff to gather in Egypt to celebrate her love for the handsome Simon (played by the problematic Armie Hammer). Although the first half of the film drags a little as Branagh goes to great lengths to set up all the red herrings that will come into play when one of the party is found dead, once the crime is committed, he tightens his grip on the story to deliver an entertainingly old-fashioned Sunday matinee-style suspense caper. Annette Bening, Sophie Okenado, Leititia Wright and Russell Brand are among cast of potential suspects.

Josephine Decker’s new film The Sky is Everywhere sees the form-challenging director of Madeline’s Madeline and Shirley take on Jandy Nelson’s best-selling YA novel of the same name with typical brio. Embracing the melodramatic conventions of teen fiction and teen movies, she brings Nelson’s story about grief and first love vividly to life with popping colours and woozy camera work, perfectly capturing the hormonal histrionics of adolescence in all their messy glory.

Gal Gadot as Linnet Ridgeway, Emma Mackey as Jacqueline De Bellefort and Armie Hammer as Simon Doyle in Death on the Nile PIC: Rob Youngson / © 2020 Twentieth Century Fox

Grace Kaufman takes the lead as Lennie, a talented teen musician reeling from the death of her older sister Bailie the previous summer. Already orphaned, she lives with her grandmother (Cherry Jones) and her quasi-hippie uncle (Jason Segel) in an idyllic woodland house in Northern California’s Enchanted Forrest where she obsesses over her dog-eared copy of Wuthering Heights and slums around in her sister’s clothes surrounded by the ephemera of their shared childhood. Upon returning to school, however, she finds herself unexpectedly falling for Joe Fontaine (Jacques Colimon), the ultra-cool new trumpet player in the school orchestra – a moment of supercharged joy that Decker stages like something out of a musical, the notes from Joe’s jazzy riffs drifting through the air with such force they knock over Lennie and her fellow pupils in a choreographed bout of a spontaneous swooning.

But in her grief-stricken state she also discovers she’s no longer able to play clarinet and, worse, finds herself reluctantly attracted to her late sister’s boyfriend, who mopes around her grandmother’s house doing odd jobs, similarly unable to move on with his life. Full of fairytale overtures, the film takes shape around Lennie gradually confronting the mortifying horror that she’s no longer able to hide in her sister’s shadow and Decker appropriates and subverts the sort of virtuosic camera moves favoured by Martin Scorsese (who produced her last film) to put us in the solipsistic headspace of her protagonist as she reconnects to the world around her. This is smart, vibrant filmmaking.

Ever since Ari Folman pioneered the notion of an animated documentary with 2008’s Waltz With Bashir, the labour-intensive format means it hasn’t exactly flourished for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, it’s put to effective use in the triple Oscar-nominated Flee, a moving film documenting the plight of a gay Afghan refugee forced to leave his homeland after the Russian occupation ended in 1989.

Director Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s subject, Amin Nawabi, was just a child when he escaped his homeland, but he’s never told anyone the full story of how he came to settle in Copenhagen and is using the occasion of his imminent marriage to his Danish partner to unburden himself and confront his past. What follows is a remarkable story of courage, suffering and heartache told by someone who has repeatedly had to deny who he is for the sake of his own survival. Which is why animation proves the ideal format.

Coming of age in a country where the existence of homosexuality is actively dismissed, Amin’s conception of himself is somewhat amorphous, something compounded by the fictions he’s had to create for himself regarding his family’s fate just so he could have a chance at building some kind of a better life. Rasmussen’s film reflects this by using animation to build a portrait of Amin’s life from his fractured memories that’s somewhat impressionistic, but veers into more expressionistic territory when trauma distorts his ability to comprehend the horrors that ordinary people are sometimes forced to endure.

Death on the Nile is in cinemas from 11 February; The Sky is Everywhere is on AppleTV+ from 11 February; Flee is on select release and Curzon Home Cinema from 11 February

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Film reviews: Death on the Nile | The Sky is Everywhere | Flee