Film
Murder on the Orient Express
Sidney Lumet stuffs a decadent 1930s train with an absurd number of movie stars and lets Albert Finney's mustachioed, faintly ridiculous Poirot pick them apart one by one. It's less about the murder than the pleasure of watching famous faces lie beautifully in fur coats and lamplight. Slow, plush, theatrical — a puzzle box dressed as a costume drama, for people who like their crime solved with velvet gloves.
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Knives Out2019
Rian Johnson's modern whodunit borrows the genre's bones — the country house, the greedy suspects, the showy detective — and rewires them with real wit and a satisfying sting of class fury.
But Its cleverness is very self-aware; if you prefer your mysteries stately rather than winking, it can feel a touch pleased with itself.

Death on the Nile1978
The same producers, the same all-star recipe, this time with Peter Ustinov's warmer, wearier Poirot cruising the Nile among suspects even more gorgeously dressed than the Orient Express crowd.
But It's essentially the same trick twice — if the formula didn't grab you the first time, more sun won't fix that.

Gosford Park2001
Robert Altman takes the country-house murder and turns the camera on the servants as much as the toffs, making the whodunit almost incidental to a sharp, sad portrait of class.
But Overlapping dialogue and a huge cast mean the mystery itself is deliberately underplayed — frustrating if you want a tight puzzle.

The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
The Lady Vanishes1938
Same premise decades earlier — a train, a crime, a cast of passengers each hiding something — but played as nimble screwball suspense instead of stately tragedy.
Hitchcock's own train-set mystery, made decades before Orient Express, is faster, funnier, and just as claustrophobic — a woman vanishes mid-journey and nobody on board will admit she existed.
But It's brisker and more comic, with none of the lavish, mournful solemnity Lumet brings — a lighter ride altogether.

More like this (8)
Clue1985
A gleeful, quotable spoof that takes the genre's stock types — the colonel, the professor, the mysterious woman — and turns the whole thing into slapstick with a body count.
But It's broad and silly by design; if you want the mystery played straight, this is the opposite of that.

Sleuth1972
Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine turn a two-man game of cat and mouse into something vicious and brilliant — all the plotting and misdirection of a Christie puzzle compressed into one house.
But No ensemble glamour here, just two men and a lot of talk — it can feel stagey and claustrophobic if you want scope.

The Mirror Crack'd1980no page yet
Angela Lansbury's Miss Marple works a film-set murder surrounded by another dazzling roster of stars — Taylor, Novak, Curtis — bickering their way toward the truth.
But It leans more comic and gossipy than Orient Express's grand solemnity, which might feel slight if you wanted more weight.
Evil Under the Sun1982
Ustinov's Poirot returns, this time on a sun-soaked island resort, with a wickedly bitchy cast and a plot built on vanity and resentment rather than grief.
But Its tone is lighter and campier throughout — don't expect the moral heaviness of the Orient Express ending.

And Then There Were None1945
The purest, tautest Christie adaptation there is: ten strangers, one island, and no detective at all — just guilt closing in on everybody, one by one.
But Stripped of movie-star glamour, it's leaner and colder — a different, harsher pleasure than the lavish ensemble mysteries.

Only Murders in the Building2021
A true-crime-podcast-obsessed trio bumble through a New York whodunit with genuine warmth and comic timing, proving the genre still has legs in a completely different key.
But It's shaggier and funnier than anything Christie-adjacent — if you want elegance and dread, this is cosier and jokier.

12 Angry Men1957
Same director, same structural engine — a confined space, a closed group, a verdict that requires picking apart human motive rather than physical clues — but stripped of all the finery and turned into something starker and more morally serious.
Sidney Lumet's own earlier film swaps the train for a jury room, but keeps his fascination with a group of strangers forced to judge one another under pressure until the truth, or something like it, surfaces.
But There's no glamour, no exotic setting, no murder to solve — just twelve men and a stifling room, which some will find far less fun than a mystery.

Twin Peaks1990
Same whodunit skeleton — an outsider investigator peeling back a community's polite surface to expose what everyone's hiding — but recast in a wildly different register, swapping elegant closure for uncanny, unresolved dread.
A small town full of secrets, a murder that unravels everyone's respectability, and a detective whose methods are as theatrical as Poirot's — except here the mystery dissolves into dream logic and dread.
But It abandons tidy resolution almost entirely and drifts into surreal horror — infuriating if you actually want your murder solved.

People
Cast
Albert FinneyHercule Poirot
Lauren BacallMrs. Harriet Belinda Hubbard
Martin BalsamSignor Bianchi
Ingrid BergmanGreta Ohlson
Sean ConneryColonel Arbuthnot
Anthony PerkinsHector MacQueen
Jean-Pierre CasselPierre Paul Michel
Wendy HillerPrinzessin Dragomiroff
Vanessa RedgraveMary Debenham
Jacqueline BissetCountess Andrenyi
John GielgudMr. Beddoes
Richard WidmarkMr. Ratchett
Directing
- Sidney LumetDirector
- Ted SturgisFirst Assistant Director
Writing
- Agatha ChristieNovel
- Paul DehnScreenplay
Production
- Norton KnatchbullLocation Manager
- John BrabourneProducer
- Richard GoodwinProducer
- Jack CauseyProduction Manager
- Louis FleuryProduction Manager
- Elisabeth WoodthorpeProduction Secretary
- Jim BrennanUnit Manager
Recommended by
The Last of Sheila, The Lady Vanishes, Death on the Nile, Evil Under the Sun, Witness for the Prosecution, Agatha Christie Poirot, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Around the World in 80 Days, And Then There Were None, Murder by Death