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[Branagh] smartly casts actors who are able to disappear into their characters... Compare that with [Death on the] Nile’s distractingly starry cast of actors self-consciously wearing their roles: garish fancy dress costumes rather than characters... [A Haunting in Venice] is enjoyable, if familiar.

A Haunting in Venice makes good use of its locale, with tons of tourist-baiting shots of the city. It just doesn’t know what to do with the tried-and-true formula its got, or how to incorporate the tweaks to that formula in a way that jolts things into life.

"A Haunting in Venice" is the best of Kenneth Branagh's Hercule Poirot movies. It's also one of Branagh's best, period, thanks to the way Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green dismantle and reinvent the source material (Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party) to create a relentlessly clever, visually dense "old" movie that uses the latest technology.

A Haunting in Venice is far from perfect, but it feels like the work of a man rejuvenated, determined to use the detective-thriller template to keep trying, teasing out the personal and weird, and tossing new ideas at the wall and seeing what works. I hope he makes ten more of these.

The film is an improvement in almost every way on Christie’s book, and a welcome course correction to the first two Hercule Poirot adaptations from director/star Branagh... [A Haunting in Venice is] moody without being tortured, and Poirot’s legendary mustache is blessedly back to being just a mustache and not a metaphor.

While there’s a decidedly old-fashioned quality to these movies, Branagh has managed to both retrofit Christie for the 21st century, capitalize on the international locales and make the Poirot character, with his abundant and amusing tics and quirks, his own.

A Haunting in Venice’s conclusion, entirely different to Christie’s, is perhaps the least satisfying of the three films; the individual clues aren’t quite prominent enough to register, nor is the logic tight enough, to incite that satisfying “a-ha!” moment. But the director’s haunted spaces have a touch of 1961’s The Innocents to them, while his off-kilter camera allows the typical frights... to feel strange and hallucinatory.

[A Haunting in Venice] has grand ambitions to be both a horror film and a cosy murder mystery. Sadly, Branagh, again taking on directing duties, finds no satisfactory way of making the chimera breathe. Working from Michael Green’s script, he stages a mystery and layers the ghostly visitations on top as if slapping sausages on ice cream.

Branagh’s film has the charm of ridiculous excess: stylistic flourishes are piled high into a treasury of gothic camp, and the camera is tilted, regardless of provocation, at the most alarming angles

What lingers from this movie isn’t the usual assemblage of clues and red herrings... but a free-floating air of grief, much of it rooted in the characters’ turbulent memories of the war just a few years earlier... For all the creakily derivative supernatural hokum on display, the ghosts that haunt this movie turn out to be all too persuasively real.

In [A Haunting in Venice] Branagh breaks all the adaptation rules. He smashes genres together. He goes fully over the top, which is exactly the direction that his Christie adaptations have been rolling toward. Branagh finally breaks free, making [the film] the best entry in the series to date.

In straddling genres, “Haunting” can get stuck in the middle. But there’s fun to be had there. What’s consistent is the elegant visuals — striking cinematography by Haris Zambarloukos — which mark this movie’s real genre as lavish old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment.