Archive for 2024

As a reader, I feel that film adaptations of novels can be good but are often inferior to the written works for two reasons. First, given the film’s shorter length, the novel must be condensed and so we lose much of the story. Second, characters are not as well developed because we do not have access to their inner thoughts and motivations as we do in written works. Nevertheless, when movies use their visual and audio capabilities to good effect, they can possess an artistic power greater than that of the written word. A Haunting in Venice, the third of Kenneth Branagh’s adaptations of Agatha Christie’s famous detective Hercule Poirot, is an example of a film being superior to the novel. Read the rest of this entry »