Murder on the Orient Express
Release date: 1974-11-22
Votes: 1465
Genres: Drama, Thriller, Mystery
In 1935, when his train is stopped by deep snow, detective Hercule Poirot is called on to solve a murder that occurred in his car the night before.
Reviews
John Chard
All star cast deliver an Agatha Christie adapted treat. Murder on the orient Express is directed by Sidney Lumet and adapted to screenplay by Paul Dehn from the novel of the same name written by Agatha Christie. It stars Albert Finney, Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, Michael York, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Widmark, Anthony Perkins, Martin Balsam, Jacqueline Bisset and John Gielgud. Music is by Richard Rodney Bennett and photography by Geoffrey Unsworth. 1935 and the Orient Express is on route from Istanbul to London. On board is legendary Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. He is called into investigative action when a passenger is found brutally stabbed to death, just as the train is ground to a halt due to heavy snow. This will not be easy for it's a case where any number of the passengers appear to have links to the deceased. The best of the big screen adaptations of Christie's Poirot works, "Orient Express" is given a consummate sheen by director Lumet and his all star cast. Finney's Poirot has a hard edge to him, which is perfectly in keeping with the story that unfolds. From the beginning, which brings a sad and potent piece of news to our viewing experience, right to the Poirot deconstruction of the crime-perpetrator-motive sequence, picture has dark tints framing the array of thespians gathered for the occasion. The setting is gorgeous, but the confines of the period train add credible claustrophobic tension to the plot, and the reveal, while not surprising to the observant, is still a doozy that is given added emotional heft by a neat character development. Darker than you may expect, but still a bunch of fun to be had playing spot the star and deducing who has done the foul deed. 8/10
CinemaSerf
Albert Finney is magnificent as Agatha Christie's "Poirot" in this murder mystery set amidst the luxury (and isolation) of the Orient Express train as it travels from Istanbul to Calais, getting stuck in a snow drift en route. A cast to make your eyes water all vie for the responsibility of murdering oriental pottery collector Richard Widmark. Why, we ask, so brutally murder a guy who collects ancient urns? Well Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery and Ingrid Bergman are just a few of the suspects under the scrutinous eye of our travelling Belgian sleuth. Sir John Gielgud plays the butler with a similar sort of reverse snobbery that won him an Oscar for "Arthur" (1981) and the imperious "Princess Dragomiroff" is played to perfection by Dame Wendy Hiller. A superbly paced and structured bit of direction from Sidney Lumet leaves you guessing for almost all of this two hour cat and mouse chase..
Movie Recommendation
Death on the Nile1978-09-29As Hercule Poirot enjoys a luxurious cruise down the Nile, a newlywed heiress is found murdered on board and every elegant passenger becomes a prime suspect.More...
Evil Under the Sun1982-03-05An opulent beach resort provides a scenic background to this amusing whodunit as Poirot attempts to uncover the nefarious evildoer behind the strangling of a notorious stage star.More...
The Odessa File1974-10-17Following the suicide of an elderly Jewish man, investigative journalist Peter Miller sets out to hunt down an SS Captain and former concentration camp commander. In doing so he discovers that, despite allegations of war crimes, the former commander has become a man of importance in industry in post-war Germany, protected from prosecution by a powerful organisation of former SS members called Odessa.More...
The Lower Depths1936-12-11Inhabitants of a flophouse struggle to survive under the harsh treatment imposed by the landlord, Kostyleva. One resident, young thief Wasska Pepel, ends his affair with the landlord's wife, Vassilissa, and takes up with her sister, Natacha. Pepel also befriends the baron, a former nobleman fallen on hard times, but Pepel's attempts at happiness are complicated when he's accused of murder by a spiteful Vassilissa.More...
Dracula1974-06-13Dracula is searching for a woman who looks like his long dead wife.More...
Daphne2017-01-29Daphne is a young woman negotiating the tricky business of modern life. Caught in the daily rush of her restaurant job and a nightlife kaleidoscope of new faces, she is witty, funny, the life of the party. Too busy to realise that deep down she is not happy. When she saves the life of a shopkeeper stabbed in a failed robbery, the impenetrable armour she wears to protect herself begins to crack, and Daphne is forced to confront the inevitability of a much-needed change in her life.More...
Cutter's Way1981-03-19Richard spots a man dumping a body, and decides to expose the man he thinks is the culprit with his friend Alex Cutter.More...
The Crypt Monster2021-08-12In the '80s, a teenage nerd notices sinister parallels between the story of his favorite comic book and the real life horrors befalling the small town where he lives. He and a few friends seek to investigate.More...
Ödipussi1988-03-10Paul Winkelmann is the CEO of a successful business in Hamburg that he took over after the death of his father eight years ago. But he is still strongly dominated by his 78 year old mother who cares for him as a child, and who cannot understand why he took an apartment on his own after all these years. The real "problem" starts when Paul gets to know psychologist Margarethe Tietze whose relationship to her parents is also not so easy after all.More...
Some Too Quiet Gentlemen1973-01-25The sleepy little village of Loubressac is well on its way to becoming a ghost town. To save the town, the local citizenry hatch a plan to attract tourists. To their horror, the plan misfires when a group of hippies are the first to move in. The hippies' free and unconventional ways quickly upset the staid lives of the locals. Then one of the locals is found murdered, and suspicion inevitably falls on the newcomers. Eventually, the locals and the hippies join forces to solve the mystery, and in the course of their adventures learn to respect each others' ways.More...
Elephants Dream2006-03-24Elephants Dream is the story of two strange characters exploring a capricious and seemingly infinite machine. The elder, Proog, acts as a tour-guide and protector, happily showing off the sights and dangers of the machine to his initially curious but increasingly skeptical protege Emo. As their journey unfolds we discover signs that the machine is not all Proog thinks it is, and his guiding takes on a more desperate aspect. Elephants Dream is a story about communication and fiction, made purposefully open-ended as the world’s first 3D animated “Open movie”. The film itself is released under the Creative Commons license, along with the entirety of the production files used to make it (roughly 7 Gigabytes of data). The software used to make the movie is the free/open source animation suite Blender along with other open source software, thus allowing the movie to be remade, remixed and re-purposed with only a computer and the data on the DVD or download.More...
Ikarie XB 11963-07-26The year is 2163. Starship Ikaria XB 1 embarks on a mission deep into space in search of alien life. During their perilous journey the crew confront the effects of a malignant dark star, the destructive legacy of the 20th century and, ultimately, the limits of their own sanity.More...
Crosscurrent2016-02-15A voyage between a woman searching for the meaning of life and a man holding a book of poems on the longest river of Mainland China.More...
They Live by Night1949-11-01An escaped convict, injured during a robbery, falls in love with the woman who nurses him back to health, but their relationship seems doomed from the beginning.More...
The Machine That Kills Bad People1952-05-14In Amalfi, a village on the Italian coast, an old man who seems to have strange powers gives Celestino Esposito, the local photographer, a dangerous ability.More...
City of Industry1997-03-14A retired thief swears revenge on the lunatic who murdered his brother and partner, while going on the run with the loot they stole.More...
Nightcap2000-10-25Mika, heiress to a Swiss chocolate company, is married to celebrated pianist André and stepmother to his son, Guillaume, whose mother died in a car wreck on his tenth birthday. Their lives are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Jeanne, a young woman who has learned she was almost switched with Guillaume at birth.More...
Tumhari Sulu2017-11-17A happy-go-lucky Mumbai suburban housewife Sulochana, fondly known as Sulu, lands the role of a night RJ, resulting in drastic changes to her routine life.More...
The Valley of Death1968-12-12An army gold shipment and its escort vanish in the Ozarks, prompting accusations of theft and desertion but frontiersman Old Shatterhand and Apache chief Winnetou help solve the mystery of the missing army gold.More...
Life with Father1947-09-13A straitlaced turn-of-the-century father presides over a family of boys and the mother who really rules the roost.More...
Similar Movies
Grand Canary
1934-07-20Based on an AJ Cronin novel, a disgraced doctor exiled to the Canary Islands, meets and falls in love with a married woman.Dr. No
1962-10-07Agent 007 battles mysterious Dr. No, a scientific genius bent on destroying the U.S. space program. As the countdown to disaster begins, Bond must go to Jamaica, where he encounters beautiful Honey Ryder, to confront a megalomaniacal villain in his massive island headquarters.From Russia with Love...
1963-10-10Agent 007 is back in the second installment of the James Bond series, this time battling a secret crime organization known as SPECTRE. Russians Rosa Klebb and Kronsteen are out to snatch a decoding device known as the Lektor, using the ravishing Tatiana to lure Bond into helping them. Bond willingly travels to meet Tatiana in Istanbul, where he must rely on his wits to escape with his life in a series of deadly encounters with the enemy.Goldfinger
1964-09-20Special agent 007 comes face to face with one of the most notorious villains of all time, and now he must outwit and outgun the powerful tycoon to prevent him from cashing in on a devious scheme to raid Fort Knox -- and obliterate the world's economy.The Tin Drum
1979-05-02Oskar Matzerath is a very unusual boy. Refusing to leave the womb until promised a tin drum by his mother, Agnes, Oskar is reluctant to enter a world he sees as filled with hypocrisy and injustice, and vows on his third birthday to never grow up. Miraculously, he gets his wish. As the Nazis rise to power in Danzig, Oskar wills himself to remain a child, beating his tin drum incessantly and screaming in protest at the chaos surrounding him.Ben-Hur
1959-11-18In 25 AD, Judah Ben-Hur, a Jew in ancient Judea, opposes the occupying Roman empire. Falsely accused by a Roman childhood friend-turned-overlord of trying to kill the Roman governor, he is put into slavery and his mother and sister are taken away as prisoners.You Only Live Twice
1967-06-13A mysterious spacecraft captures Russian and American space capsules and brings the two superpowers to the brink of war. James Bond investigates the case in Japan and comes face to face with his archenemy Blofeld.On Her Majesty's Secr...
1969-12-18James Bond tracks his archnemesis, Ernst Blofeld, to a mountaintop retreat in the Swiss alps where he is training an army of beautiful, lethal women. Along the way, Bond falls for Italian contessa Tracy Draco, and marries her in order to get closer to Blofeld.Out of the Past
1947-11-25The peaceful life of a gas station owner is disrupted when a man from his past arrives in town and forces him to return to the dark world he had tried to escape.Contact
1997-07-11A radio astronomer receives the first extraterrestrial radio signal ever picked up on Earth. As the world powers scramble to decipher the message and decide upon a course of action, she must make some difficult decisions between her beliefs, the truth, and reality.The Bridges of Madiso...
1995-06-02Photographer Robert Kincaid wanders into the life of housewife Francesca Johnson for four days in the 1960s.The Spy Who Loved Me
1977-07-07Russian and British submarines with nuclear missiles on board both vanish from sight without a trace. England and Russia both blame each other as James Bond tries to solve the riddle of the disappearing ships. But the KGB also has an agent on the case.The Shining
1980-05-23Jack Torrance accepts a caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel, where he, along with his wife Wendy and their son Danny, must live isolated from the rest of the world for the winter. But they aren't prepared for the madness that lurks within.Manhattan
1979-04-25Manhattan explores how the life of a middle-aged television writer dating a teenage girl is further complicated when he falls in love with his best friend's mistress.Moonraker
1979-06-26After Drax Industries' Moonraker space shuttle is hijacked, secret agent James Bond is assigned to investigate, traveling to California to meet the company's owner, the mysterious Hugo Drax. With the help of scientist Dr. Holly Goodhead, Bond soon uncovers Drax's nefarious plans for humanity, all the while fending off an old nemesis, Jaws, and venturing to Venice, Rio, the Amazon...and even outer space.A View to a Kill
1985-05-24A newly-developed microchip designed by Zorin Industries for the British Government that can survive the electromagnetic radiation caused by a nuclear explosion has landed in the hands of the KGB. James Bond must find out how and why. His suspicions soon lead him to big industry leader Max Zorin who forms a plan to destroy his only competition in Silicon Valley by triggering a massive earthquake in the San Francisco Bay.Finding Forrester
2000-12-21Gus Van Sant tells the story of a young African American man named Jamal who confronts his talents while living on the streets of the Bronx. He accidentally runs into an old writer named Forrester who discovers his passion for writing. With help from his new mentor Jamal receives a scholarship to a private school.The Last Emperor
1987-10-04A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.Murder She Said
1961-09-26Miss Marple believes she's seen a murder in a passing-by train, yet when the police find no evidence she decides to investigate it on her own.Murder at the Gallop
1963-06-24Miss Marple and Mr. Stringer are witnesses to the death by heart attack of elderly, rich Mr. Enderby. Yet they have their doubts about what happened. The police don't believe them, thus leading Miss Marple to yet again investigate by herself.