Judi Dench

Sometimes, we can speculate that the Academy awards certain performances not because they're the best, but because they should have won long before.

The adaptation of a popular YA book series is a total mess.

Um, what?

SPOILER ALERT: Pretty freaking weird.

The claws surprisingly don't come out.

Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ wastes its impressive cast for sluggish storytelling.

If you like murder mysteries, absurdly big mustaches, and Judi Dench in fur coats, then Murder on the Orient Express is for you. Kenneth Branagh directs and stars in the adaptation of Agatha Christie’s novel about 13 strangers who all become suspects in a locomotive murder...

The game is afoot, chums. There’s been a murder most foul, and you are a suspect. That is, in the event that you happen to be Willem Dafoe, Johnny Depp, Daisy Ridley, Judi Dench, Josh Gad, Tom Bateman, Lucy Boynton, or one of the other travelers aboard the Orient Express. As the grand locomotive makes its hazardous journey through a snow-tipped mountain range, one of the riders commits a heinous crime, and it falls to none other than the great investigator Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh, who also happens to be directing this hullabaloo) to sort out the facts in pursuit of the truth.

As a certified Dame, actress and living treasure Judi Dench might as well be royalty — she’s certainly played it enough. She won the Academy Award for a blink-and-you-miss-it turn as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love, and breathed new life into Victoria with the 1997 film Mrs. Brown. And after a two-decade hiatus, Dench will reprise the role of the nineteenth-century ruler for her next big film project, Victoria and Abdul. The newly released trailer wants to make one thing abundantly clear: yes, she will deliver one of those trademark Dench speeches, the kind that draws Oscar voters like moths to a high-prestige flame.

Kenneth Branagh’s big screen adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is no small affair. In fact, the cast of the film is so enormous that Entertainment Weekly had to rotate the cover featuring the cast to landscape to fit everyone in.