#rian-johnson

#rian-johnson

In the seventeenth chapter of John Dickson Carr's mystery novel " The Three Coffins " (1935), the story pauses so that Dr. Gideon Fell, a brilliant sleuth, can deliver the "Locked-Room Lecture," an elaboration of all the various methods by which a person might be found murdered in a "hermetically sealed chamber," a room locked from the inside. It's one of the most justly celebrated passages in the history of detective fiction,

The performances overwhelm you. Buckley makes you feel her incessant pain and grief while Mescal effortlessly captures a man able to communicate not through speech but through his written words. Jacobi Jupe, as Agnes and William's son Hamnet, gives a performance that's wise beyond his years. Max Richter's score including the use of his well-known On the Nature of Daylight enhances the experience as does ukasz Zal's mood-setting cinematography.

When the film director Rian Johnson was a child, he picked up the final book that Agatha Christie published before her death, in 1976: "Curtain: Poirot's Last Case." The novel was sitting on a shelf in his grandparents' sprawling home, in Denver. It had a moody black cover that featured an illustration of the mustachioed detective Hercule Poirot. "It felt very adult," Johnson told me recently. "Very creepy."

By that he meant that Wake Up Dead Man, the latest Benoit Blanc mystery, would harken back to the origins of the whodunit, and in particular the gothic vibes of Edgar Allan Poe. And now that I've seen it, I have to say that Johnson pulled it off: the new movie has a darker and more spiritual feel than its predecessors, and yet it's still distinctly Knives Out, which is to say twisting and hilarious. I gasped a few times, as did the rest of audience, at the many reveals.

I think theatrical is not going anywhere, pointing to the box office success of Ryan Coogler's 'Sinners' and 'A Minecraft Movie.'