Movie Nation

A rich and powerful patriarch faces the end with a household full of women scheming against him in “The Origin of Evil,” a clever and twisty French thriller that’s a little bit “King Lear” and a little bit more “Sucession.”

Sébastien Marnier’s film invites us to root for this or that character amongst the schemers depicted here — old man Serge (Jacques Weber) being out-manuevered by his vindictive daughter George (Doria Tillier), being bled dry by his hatefully-spendthrift wife Louise (Dominique Blanc), being robbed by their adored but sneaky cook and housekeeper Agnes (Véronique Ruggia), the granddaughter (Céleste Brunnquell) who may be a mere observer, but one prone to taking sides.

And then there’s the struggling fish-packing plant worker, the long lost illegitimate child given a man’s name, like his other daughter. Stephane (Laure Calamy) has just tracked Serge down.

“No no, I don’t want anything,” she insists to him. But we’ve seen her parlous, messy life, the room she’s renting being taken away, the calls she keeps making to Toulon Prison.

Just when you start to figure out one character is worth pulling for, their greed, their sketchy past, their anti-semitism, homophobia or what-have-you bubbles up.

Louise suffers from “syllogomania” and their Porqueralles villa is stuffed with junk, the phone constantly in her hands, the TV constantly tuned to whatever French home shopping network has her attention today.

“I know she does it to piss me off,” Serge tells his newfound daughter (in French with English subtitles).

Agnes the maid avails herself of whatever prizes Louise can’t keep track of as she stores it all.

George runs her father’s businesses “American style,” and loathes every breath he takes.

“Stop, you’re breaking my heart,” he cracks at some feigned slight.

“We can rip it out, too,” she threatens. George is obviously the one most afraid of new “sister” Stephane’s arrival, telling her “Don’t come back.”

But Stephane has seen the opulence, the comfortable life. And we know she’s lied about her job to her father, and she won’t produce ID for George.

Director Marnier (“School’s Out”) and co-writer Fanny Burdino give us motives and give away character flaws that throw us off the scent as they direct, re-direct and misdirect our loyalties.

Calamy, of the recent “Two Tickets to Greece” and “My Donkey, My Lover and I,” makes our central character smiling yet mysterious, just polished and performative enough to wonder about and just cunning enough to root for, no matter what we find out about her.

She can’t be worse than anybody else, right? Her “new family” ranges from dizzy and rude to treacherous and downright dangerous.

Weber gives Serge shades of “a man in full,” hints of entitlement mixed with aged regrets he claims he does not harbor because “we all make mistakes.” Failing health or not, we cannot underestimate him.

That’s true of everything in this confection of a mystery. We’re forever being shown how we don’t really know what cruelty this character is capable of, the kindness of another, the extremes each will go to cultivate her or his self-interest.

It’s not “Lear” or “Knives Out” or “Succession,” but “The Origin of Evil” works, a thriller that keeps you guessing as it keeps time like a pretty good French knockoff Swiss watch.

Rating: R, violence, nudity, sex

Cast: Laure Calamy, Jacques Weber, Dominique Blanc, Doria Tillier, Véronique Ruggia, Céleste Brunnquell and Suzanne Clément.

Credits: Directed by Sébastien Marnier, scripted by Fanny Burdino and Sébastien Marnier. An IFC release.

Running time: 2:02

“Outlaw Johnny Black” takes its title from “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” its first gag from “A Fistful of Dollars,” its hero’s wardrobe from “Django Unchained,” its plot from “Buck and the Preacher” (sort of) and its cast from a pool of folks who knows how cool Michael Jai White’s “Black Dynamite” was.

This parody of blaxploitation Westerns starts funny, hits the sweet spot a few times and finishes reasonably well. But the long middles acts? Like the cowboy who recognized the tall green man made of rubber said about his horse, “That there’s a little Pokey, pardner.”

White plays a lone gunman on the range, hunting down the curr (Chris Browning) who killed his preacher daddy (Glynn Turman, seen in eyepatch flashbacks). Johnny Black figures the murderer has a bullet with his name on it. Because that’s in Johnny’s pocket, a Colt round with “Brett Clayton” etched on the casing.

Johnny himself is wanted, as we learn when he busts up a street assault on a Native American (not really) couple. The good folks in “Cheyanne” (note the spelling) recollect he’s up for “bank robbery, train robbery, improper white woman eye contact,” the works. They recognize him from his wanted poster.

Actually, that’s a photo of ever-smiling Scatman Crothers, “The Shining” star who died during the Reagan administration.

Our tone is set, a jokey Western with quick gunplay and Johnny dropping bad guys with his quick kicks “upside your head.” The plot is put in motion when Johnny takes the place of a preacher (Byron Minns, co-writer) he figures hostile natives have killed, and tries to pass himself off as a Man of God at sleepy, intregrated Hope Springs.

Barry Bostwick plays the town boss who wants to get the church’s land (oil). Two sisters (Anika Noni Rose and Erika Ash) vie for the can’t-recall-his-daddy’s-sermons reverand’s romantic attention. And the saloon singer (Jill Scott) regales the yokels, cow-punchers and gunmen with her bluesy rendition of that Old West standard “You Ain’t S–t!” between barroom brawls.

There’s funny stuff here, and gags as lame as having Johnny’s horse literally “kick the bucket.” White’s fighting skills aren’t put on display often enough. But the pacing is funereal. . There’s no giddyap or get-up-and-go to a 132 minute movie with 75 minutes of plot and jokes. Not even Michael Jai White’s cool enough to cover for that.

The long cast list on IMDb suggests this has to be cut down a bit just to get it this “short.” It wasn’t enough.

Rating: PG-13, violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Michael Jai White, Anika Noni Rose, Erica Ash, Barry Bostwick, Jill Scott, Chris Browning, Tommy Davidson and Glynn Turman.

Credits: Directed by, scripted by Michael Jai White. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 2:12

I was attending my first New York Film Festival in 1990 when the Chinese Cinema Revolution reached America’s shores.

The film was Zhang Yimou and Yang Fengliang’s overwrought, elegaic and allegorial “Ju Dou,” and it gave much of the world its first taste of the great Chinese filmmakers about to break out of the confines of the People’s Republic, the force of film nature that was actress Gong Li and the glories of Chinese color cinematography.

“Chinese Technicolor” was the whisper around Alice Tully Hall. Hollywood and European movies just didn’t look like this. Not any more.

Titles like “Life on a String,” Raise the Red Lantern,” “To Live,” “The Story of Qiu Ji” and other “Fifth Generation” Chinese cinema poured out, a red tide of gorgeously-shot films that sometimes battled past censors, sometimes made their points obliquely and metaphorically, and bowled over the movie world.

The masterpiece among those masterpieces has to be “Farewell My Concubine,” a true epic, a Chinese “Doctor Zhivago” that takes a Chinese opera relationship between “stage brothers” from the 1920s and an “Oliver Twist” youth with beatings and a suicide in opera school, through the Sino-Japanese War (WWII), the Communist takeover, the denunciations of the Cultural Revolution all the way to 1990.

And its central relationship is notable for being an (apparently unrequited) same sex love story, two stars of China’s stylized all-male opera, mentoring and supporting each other, feuding in jealousy when one gets married, struggling to save each other from the Japanese, the Nationalist government, the Communists and each other over the decades.

Chen Kaige’s film was banned in China for its homosexuality, suicide and perhaps for the unflattering depiction of the uglier aspects of Chinese Communist history, and that only made it more tempting to Western audiences.

For its 30th anniversary, “Farewell My Concubine” has been restored for re-release by Film Movement. Well done. This is a movie lover’s bucket-list film, so you have your orders.

Two aged stars are seen in silhouette, rehearsing in in the fictive present. They’ve been apart for decades, they tell a facilities manager. A lot of things kept them apart.

It was “the Gang of Four’s” doing, one jokes. “Isn’t everything,” the other cracks?

Decades before, a child was given up by his prostitute mother to the almost Medieval — in more ways than one — Peking Opera. He is rejected for his bent back and having an extra finger on one hand. His mother gets him off her hands by lopping off that extra finger. The opera’s Dickensian leadership straps little Douzi to a rack to straighten his back. But the canings doled-out to one and all as their “training” could kill the slight shild.

The rebellious Shitou sticks up for him, turns back the bullies and even takes a caning of two on the frail child’s behalf. They bond for life.

The film is a nearly three hour saga of their relationship as it spins around their most famous roles, as the concubine and the king in a popular Chinese opera. Life onstage mimics life offstage, with the feminine and demure Douzi, aka Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) pitching his voice in its highest register and his bluff, breaks-bricks-with-his-forehead co-star and protector Shitou, using his given name Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) as an adult, playing the masculine, belicose but romantic king onstage and off.

They study, face years of corporal punishment and are discovered by an impressario, a moment of triumph with a brutal bloody edge. Dieyi is pursued by a rich “patron” (You Ge) with a thing for opera and the most feminine opera star of them all. And Xiaolou carries on with a local prostitute (Gong Li) until she is pursued by a few too many suitors and he rashly tells this “damsel in distress” and her cruder customers that they’re engaged.

Dieyi doesn’t take this well. Their testy menage a trois is pulled this way and that by the fortunes of World War II, Japanese threats followed by denunciations by Nationalists topped by dogmatic and judgmental Communists who kick out the Nationalists.

Gong Li’s turn as Xuxian shows vulnerability, insecurity and on a couple of occasions when the chips are down, a steely resolve and eye for leverage against this new “official” threat or that one. We never question her love for her savior, or her grudging acceptance of his connection with his co-star.

The “stage brothers” act and fight and struggle to get along and face one moment of truth after another as they surf the currents of turbulent 20th century Chinese history. And every so often, a tableaux of that history intrudes on their insular world.

They live their whole lives by the ethos of their cruel taskmaster of a teacher (Qi Lü).

“If you belong to the human race,” he barks (in Mandarin with English subtitles), “you go to the opera.” It is what marks someone’s “civilized” “humanity.”

The scope of the script, based on a Lillian Lee novel (she co-adapted it) became a template for Chinese “Fifth Generation” cinema, a way of relating modern Chinese history and rationalising the excesses of this leader or that era through a personal story.

The peformances are startling in the stylized gestures and almost musical sing-song of the stage work and the unspoken bond and love, jealousies battling loyalties, offstage. The echoes of their childhood “training” and trauma spill over onto a baby that take into the company as children, whom they later try to train the same way as an adult (Lei Han) — lots of canings and worse.

But it is the colors, the life contained in those vivid those tableux, the theaters, street scenes of this or that army marching by, the shadows and fog of “reality” intruding on the rigidly constrained theatrical performances that stick in the memory from this masterpiece.

“Farewell My Concubine” captures a moment in cinematic time when artistic freedom of expression first publicly chafed at the restraints of a totalitarian state. Here was a government that was no longer in sync with the vibrant, long repressed culture all but exploding off the screen thanks to a generation of artists ready to show the world masterpieces, even if their leaders weren’t sure they should allow them to.

Rating: R, violence, sex, profanity

Cast:Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi, You Ge, Ying Da, Lü Qi, Lei Han and Gong Li.

Credits: Directed by Chen Kaige, scripted by Lillian Lee and Lue Wei, based on Lee’s novel. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 2:51

Like astronauts Neil Armstrong and Guion Bluford, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and movie directors Steven Spielberg and David Lynch, I am an Eagle Scout. In Lynch’s case, he used to approve only one biographical sentence in press notes delivered to movie critics whenever he had a film coming out.

“David Lynch, Eagle Scout, Missoula, Montana.”

I always thought that was cool. But any Scouting recognition lost a lot of its lustre in the early ’90s, when a century of sexual abuse and its cover-up came to light in Patrick Boyle’s damning expose, “Scouts Honor.” My father was a Scoutmaster, and I remember talking with him about the book and the TV coverage that erupted when the many “local” stories turned into a national scandal.

He and I encountered scores of Scouts and Scout leaders over the years. Neither of us had a clue, which tells you…nothing. Because that’s the way the Boy Scouts of America “handled” this “problem” for decades. It was covered up. Kids generally are afraid and ashamed to talk of abuse while its happening, and there weren’t any whispers either of us heard about Scout leaders and troops in our corner of rural America.

But as the new documentary “Scouts Honor” makes clear, it was going on from the beginning of the Scouting movement in England. The Boy Scouts of America would publish “Red Flag” lists of pedophiles whod been caught and might try to “volunteer” with a new troop in a new town way back in the 1920s.

“Scouts Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts of America,” delivers just what its title promises, apalling accounts of decade after decade of minimizing horrific abuse by serial boy-rapists, a scandal so big it “dwarfs” the “Catholic Church and Baptist Church” scandals, as one expert testifies in the film.

Brian Knappenberger’s film is built around testimonials of many men who have come forward to sign onto the lawsuits that pushed the Boy Scouts of America into bankruptcy, and interviews with Boyle, who blew the lid off this national “corporate” scandal, with BSA insider and whistleblower Michael Johnson, Scouting’s first “Youth Protection” officer, a veteran child abuse investigator with the Plano, Texas, PD, and former Scouting legal counsel Steven McGowan, who correctly states that “We’re a microcosm of entire society. If we had a problem, our society had a problem.”

Most of what McGowan says on camera comes off as “deflection,” blame-shifting and in Johnson’s words, “lying.” Johnson, who came on board long after the national scandal blew up, complains that the culture hasn’t changed and that too little has been done to prevent pedophiles from pursuing a Boy Scout association to aid their predations.

“Why did you choose the Boy Scouts,” one convicted sex offender (in prison) is asked? “Because they made it so easy.”

The victims’ testimonies can be heartbreaking and infuriating — a brother remembering his younger sibling who killed himself, as a teen, after being molested by a Catholic priest/schoolteacher and Scout leader in New Jersey in the ’70s, and most chilling of all, the “sex ring” that suspiciously “single men” set up with New Orleans Troop 137, creating and running child prostitution with poor boys in the city and “clients” passed off as “visiting Scout leaders” flying in from Europe, as if jetting in to a Third World “anything goes” brothel in Bangkok.

Knappenberger digs into the “secret files,” and the takes his film into the “after this became public knowledge” years. The “problem” continued largely thanks to the pigheaded homophobia of the Catholic Church and the Mormon Church, which played a larger and larger role in Scouting — basically running it in recent decades — until the LDS Church dropped the BSA (in 2019) after the organization lifted its ban on gay Scoutmasters in 2015.

Homosexuality and pedophilia are not related, one is not a predictor factor in the other, with no scientific correlation found.

Experts in the field of child abuse, survivors and lawyers involved in the class action suit liken this to every “boarding school,” “Catholic Church” and “Baptist” scandal writ larger mostly thanks to the long records the non-profit corporation has kept, its “Perversion Files,” recognizing a “problem” and treating it as a PR issue, something they needed to keep quiet lest the “brand” become impossible to market to new generations.

When victims were asked to come forward to tell their stories for the class action lawsuit, over 80,000 did.

After this  damning indictment of a film, Scouting’s “Norman Rockwell,” “patriotic” and “American values” image will never be the same. The life skills those of us lucky enoug And any cachet Spielberg, George W. Bush or me and my Eagle Scout friends could claim from that is forever tarnished, even if the organization avoids being put out of business in bankruptcy court and its ordained payouts.

Rating: TV-MA, accounts of sexual abuse

Credits: Directed by Brian Knappenberger. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

As we enter the fifth decade of gay coming-of-age screen romances, the biggest challenge for filmmakers seems to be finding something new to say on the subject. To be fair, the straight version of such tales of “first love” has been similarly trapped for a lot longer.

“Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe” is a sweet period piece about middle class Mexican American teens figuring out their same sex attraction over a couple of El Paso summers in the late ’80s.

Based on a novel by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, it’s safe, unchallenging, PG-13 and just bougie enough to fit in that “Love, Simon” formula. English, Spanish or Spanglish, this love affair isn’t going to be “Amores Perros.” But handled with great sensitivity by all involved, it comes off in all the most predictable ways.

Max Pelayo, also in the new drama “Marisol,” is our hero and narrator, a kid given the lofty name “Aristostle” by his mailman father.

It took me six scenes to figure out that white haired, bearded patriarch was Eugenio Derbez.

“Ari” is a loner lost in his thoughts who has figured out, at 16, that “alone is better.” But he’s no sooner narrated “one more summer without learning to swim” when a stranger offers to help. That’s Dante (Reese Gonzales), a freer spirit, son of college educated parents (Kevin Alejandro and Eva Longoria), a lover of art (his dad’s a professor) and still teen enough to debate the merits of various comic books.

They strike up a friendship, hang out with each other’s families, dabble in astronomy and ignore the nattering of the school gossup (Isabella Gomez) and the sympathetic winks of Ari’s “she’s different” aunt (Marlene Forte).

Dante’s dad takes a research sabbatical and they’re separated a year, and the tone of his letters suggests sexual coming of age and makes Ari uncomfortable in ways such narratives always lead us into.

And then Dante comes home.

Everything above is something of a genre cliche, and the film’s later second and entire third act is no different. But “sweet” does a lot of heavy lifting. The performances are sensitive, and the soft-sale of the story arc doesn’t hammer home its points. Writer-director Aitch Alberto just lets them happen.

The leads are attractive, nicely immersed in their roles. And the presence of Longoria and Derbez in the cast got the film financed and distributed.

It’s a gentle as well as generic take on this subject, with some gay bashing (1987, El Paso, Latino community) to remind us how far the culture has come in terms of tolerance, and make one wonder how far it has to go.

Movies like “Aristotle and Dante” aren’t for the jaded or worldly, as Longoria and Derbez might agree. The whole idea here is to show teens that this “There’s something wrong with me” speech (another genre cliche) isn’t accurate, that they aren’t the first to feel that way and that loving parents — especially today — are better equipped to handle that.

That messaging, the engaging leading men and the picture’s inherent charm put it over, despite its many “on-the-nose” situations and despite the comically symbolic names “Aristotle” and “Dante,” something only a writer dazzling in Young Adult fiction would concoct.

Rating: PG-13, one violent scene, some profanity

Cast: Max Pelayo, Reese Gonzales, Veronica Falcón,
Marlene Forte, Kevin Alejandro, Isabella Gomez, Eugenio Derbez and Eva Longoria.

Credits: Scripted by Aitch Alberto, based on the novel by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:37

Taking “Godzilla” out of its post-war Japan setting, a country and culture struggling to take on the mantle of victimhood but silently knowing they deserved to be punished, kind of ruined most of the recent iterations of the monster for me.

A warning against technology, nuclear proliferation and heedless “progress” that awakens the dark side of nature only goes so far. What’s been missing is the knowledge that this awful thing is something they brought down on themselves, through brutal aggression, crimes against humanity, racism and barbarism.

Veteran Japanese director Takashi Yamazaki gives us that setting, and perhaps some of that original terror and guilt back in this version of “Oh no, there goes Tokyo.”

“Godzilla Minus One” opens Dec. 1.

“Io sto bene” is a quiet Italian take on the inter-European immigrant experience, a reverie recalled on two timelines as an old man’s encounter with a young woman reminds him of his accidental move to tiny Luxembourg over 50 years before.

Luxembourg-based writer-director Donato Rotunno (“Baby (a)alone”) traffics in nostalgia and concentrates on the little dramas of closely-observed lives in this gentle but generally unaffecting melodrama, Luxembourg’s contender for a Best Foreign Language Oscar nomination a couple of years back.

In the mid-60s, three young friends with no knowledge of foreign languages and few marketable skills ride a train north from their Italian village. A conductor checks their passports and work visas and tells them something they didn’t realize before leaving home.

Vito (Vittorio Nastri) is headed to Belgium. Wait, aren’t we all? No. Giussepe (Maziar Firouzi) will be seeking his fortune in Germany and Antonio (Alessio Lapice) is heading for Luxembourg. Wait, Luxembourg isn’t in Germany? Or Belgium?

Well, they’ll straighten that out when they get there they figure.

But a very old Antonio (Renato Carpentieri), feted as he retires and tries to motor home from the business he helped build in an Alfa Romeo he hasn’t driven in decades, recalls that they never did.

What jars his memory is having a fender bender that a young woman, Leo (Sara Serraiocco), sees and that makes her offer to drive him home. Leo’s an Italian DJ, working the clubs, struggling to make it in a new country just as Antonio did many years before.

The film is about their connection in the present and how that triggers his memories of the ups and downs of his sad saga, moving far from home, losing touch with family and friends, writing back to his parents with letters that always include “Io sto bene,” “I am fine.”

In the present, Antonio is in the process of selling his flat and moving to assisted living, as he is newly-widowed and walks with a cane. The story’s long flashbacks show us his early life in the country, cheated by the locals as he works hard as a laborer, mason and house painter, the “meet cute” moment he meets his future wife, Mady (Marie Jung) and the reason he still walks with a limp.

In the present, he is winding life down. But in this mercurial Italian stranger who brought a college degree in graphic design and a yen for elaborately conceived video to accompany her club mixes north from Italy, he sees something of himself, and a chance to pay it forward.

“In Italy,” Leo tells him (in Italian with English subtitles), “you spend your day waiting.” For a spot in line to apply for a job. When you complain, “they say their are thousands like you.”

She was “suffocating.” So it was with Antonio. But when he met the assertive, demanding Luxembourger Mady, he found purpose, drive, a need to “become a man” and become a success. But there were tests and missteps along the way. Heartbreaks too, it is implied, but those are mostly off-camera.

Leo is being similarly tested, a young woman lacking direction and anyone to help her find her way.

The chief shortcoming of the movie with the generic every-letter-home-everywhere title is that there’s nothing more to it than this.

There’s a hint of sweetness to old Antonio’s concern for Leopoldina, and a rash edge to her reluctance to accept help, even after a club owner sexually assaults her and blackballs her.

But otherwise, their stories don’t interrelate well. As interesting as skipping through the ebb and flow of his earlier life — writing love letters on behalf of Vito to the younger sister of Giuseppe is bound to bring trouble when everybody goes “home” for a visit — might be, there’s not enough here to fashion a compelling generational changing-of-the-guard narrative.

The wistful regrets that accompany such an uprooting, loved ones who break off contact, possibilities lost because of the curse of a country lacking opportunities going back generations, tell us everything letters that begin with “I am fine” leave out. It’s just not consequential, exceptional or interesting enough to add up to a more compelling movie.

Rating: unrated, one scene of violence, sex, profanity, smoking

Cast: Renato Carpentieri, Alessio Lapice, Sara Serraiocco, Marie Jung, Vittorio Nastri and Maziar Firouzi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Donato Rotunno. An IndiePix release.

Running time: 1:36

Take any genre, any movie in any film series and add Tina Fey to it and the proceedings are always going to be more fun.

Fey joins Kenneth Branagh‘s merry parade of Hercule Poirot period pieces for “A Haunting in Venice,” a spooky, stylish thriller loosely based on Dame Agatha Christie’s novel “Hallowe’en Party.”

Branagh’s ever-so-elegantly romped through these Poirot movies, vamping through murders that must be solved, a mustache and Belgian ACK-sant that must be curled. Now it’s time for someone to make fun of him to his face. The University of Virginia’s wittiest alumna is the perfect woman for the job.

“You’re doing that thing where you pretend to know more than anbody else.”

Fey plays a famous mystery novelist who “borrows” from Poirot’s persona and his cases for her books, a friend — “I ‘ave no friends.” — who is something of an irritant, showing up in Venice after The War, a place of peace and an epicurean life for the now-retired detective, interrupted only by frantic suitors who want Poirot to look into this or that mystery.

That’s why Poirot keeps Portfoglio (the wonderful Riccardo Scamarcio of “The Ruthless”) around, an ex-cop who serves as a bodyguard and personal assistant. But Portfoglio doesn’t keep Fey’s Ariadne Oliver at bay.

There’s a seance coming, a woman who wants to hear from her dead daughter in a supposedly haunted palazzo. Ariadne and Poirot have one thing they can agree on. “Mediums,” spiritualists and psychics are predatory frauds. Let’s go, Poirot, and poke holes in this mysterious Mrs. Reynolds and her “commune with the spirits of the dead” act.

“I am the smartest person I know, and I can’t figure it out,” Ariadne tells Hercule. “So I came to the second.”

Newly-crowned Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh plays Reynolds with a self-serious gravitas that chills.

“It is the hallow tide (Halloween). We’re close. Your spirit is close…We are listening!”

Kelly Reilly is the mother of the dead woman, who may have killed herself over a love affair. Her “nerve storms” troubled doctor (Jamie Dornan) is present, the doctor’s young son (Jude Hill), along with a Russian who runs the household (Camille Cottin), all sitting in with Poirot, Ariadne, Mrs. Reynolds and her two Roma assistants (Emma Laird and Ali Khan).

Are Mrs. Reynolds and the others hearing from Alicia (via a spirit-typewriter)? Or will Poirot punch out Harry Houdini’s favorite punching bag, “mediums?”

“Terrors for children, Mrs. Reynolds,” Poirot grumbles. “I have been, in life, uncharmed by your kind.'”

A murder will intrude on this All Hallow’s Eve, and everybody’s a suspect. But Poirot is seeing things, and as reluctant as he may be, there may come a point when he has to agree with everybody else present, that there is something supernatural, something relacted to a “children’s curse” associated with this place, in play here. Or not.

“No one shall leave until I find if the living have been killed by the dead!”

Branagh is a stylish old school filmmaker sometimes unjustly criticized for the sort of camera flourishes — he films lots of characters in close-up, camera slightly above peering down on them to increase our unease — that whole schools of cinema worship Welles, Hitchcock and Kurosawa for. Critics have carped on his fondness for adding cinematic sizzle to his pictures since “Dead Again,” his first foray into mystery-thrillers.

Here he uses the beautiful and ancient city sparingly, and a watery palazzo gone to seed makes a splendid set for all these murders and frights and things that go bump in he night.

These Christie films have a shared air of lost affluence, of a more literate, high-toned age of conversation that vanished long before our age of tweets and modern vulgarisms.

“The voices speak,” Mrs. Reynolds intones, explaining her typewriter. “I take dictation.”

Mystery movies these days are harder to pull off as the audience has seen enough of these to often be a step or two ahead of the movie. As in the “Knives Out” pictures, Branagh isn’t constrained by playing by the rules and fear of “cheating.”

But it’s not just the mystery that recommends “Haunting” and its Christie/Branagh antecdents. It’s the world we’re immersed in, the grand casts playing colorful “types” we recognize in it, the forlourn air of this film, of a generation haunted by the second of two world wars which has just concluded.

“Scars are not always of the body,” Poirot knows.

I haven’t loved all of these semi-campy/semi-serious Branagh dates with Dame Agatha. But “Haunting” is an unadulerated delight. Only in “Venice” can you hear Tina Fey scream.

Rating: PG-13 for some strong violence, disturbing images and thematic elements

Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Michelle Yeoh, Tina Fey, Jamie Dornan, Kelly Reilly, Riccardo Scamarcio, Camille Cottin, Emma Laird, Ali Khan and Jude Hill.

Credits: Directed by Kenneth Branagh, scripted by Michael Green, based on the novel by Agatha Christie. A 20th Century release.

Running time: 1:43

A woman tries to reconnect with her estranged…and very rich French family in this Sébastien Marnier (“School’s Out”) thriller.

Looks privileged and acrid.

Sept. 22, this rolls out in select cities.

A fish-out-of-water thriller about two lasses taking work in the most sexist place on Earth.

Hugo Weaving? Scarier as he gets older. Neon has “The Royal Hotel,” so the release date is TBD. Worth keeping an eye out for, though.