Review: With ‘A Haunting in Venice,’ Kenneth Branagh’s Agatha Christie series hits its stride

Early on in Kenneth Branagh’s delectably creepy “A Haunting in Venice,” as gondolas cut through waterways and the sun sets on one of the world’s most impossibly beautiful cities, there arises a melody that you might recognize as “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis.” It’s a welcome if incongruous choice of music, evoking a bright, cheery vision of early 20th-century America that is otherwise absent from the movie, which is set over a dark and stormy Halloween night in 1947 Italy. Kelly Reilly in the movie “A Haunting in Venice.” Into this house of horrors comes the famed Belgian detective and designated party-pooper Hercule Poirot, who’s retired from official duty but still willing to take on cases that interest him — or, in this case, offend his strict rationalist instincts. Gorgeously shot on location by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, “A Haunting in Venice” is easily the best of Branagh’s three big-screen Christie adaptations, largely because it is also the most flagrantly unfaithful. If the earlier “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile” felt like lavish but superfluous retreads of beloved Christie classics, here, Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green have wisely dispensed with, and ultimately improved on, one of Poirot’s least memorable cases.