Overly expository

Rating: 5/10 (8 May 2018)

Legendary Belgian detective moustache Hercule Poirot is taking a brief leisure trip on the Orient Express when - wouldn't you know it! - the train is stranded by avalanche, one of the pencil moustaches on board is murdered, and Poirot is faced with a train full of deeply suspicious and hugely famous suspects (except some who aren't quite so famous).
Knight of the realm Kenneth Branagh directs and wears Poirot's vast and enormously distracting moustache with its inconsistent grey streaks in this second pass at Agatha Christie's classic whodunit.
It's nicely staged, with a quantity of not entirely convincing CGI showing us the train amid attractive Alpine scenery. Another theatrical knight and a Dame join some high profile Americans, Rey from the new Star Wars and the idiot snowman from Frozen. All of them have fun especially offscreen - chatshows make it clear the rapport between them.
I suspect they have more fun than the audience. After a while I started to lose interest in the wealth of detail about the interest in, and connections to, a crime which was not the one being investigated. I was force fed a vast amount of information, not all of it relevant (or "red herrings" as such stuff is known in the Whodunnit game), and I suspect this sort of information dump works better on the printed page, when you are able to go back and re-check who said what to and about whom.
This is not altogether successful, although it is not without merit (star power, and the opening sequence in Jerusalem, to name two).