17 Movies Like A Haunting in Venice (2023) On Netflix Australia (Page 2)

Staff & contributors

Chasing the feel of watching A Haunting in Venice ? Here are the movies we recommend you watch right after.

Kenneth Branagh’s third Hercule Poirot movie does everything it can to divorce itself from the quaintness of a typical Agatha Christie adaptation. Loosely based on the novel Hallowe’en Party, this outing swaps exotic locales for the claustrophobic confines of a gothic Venetian palazzo and flirts outright with horror. The film, shot through more Dutch angles than an Amsterdam maths class has ever seen, uses the genre's visual language to credibly suggest that this mystery might actually have paranormal undertones. Forcing Poirot to reconsider his die-hard loyalty to rational explanations is an interesting twist — it punctures the idea of him as a mystery-solving god and gives the film bigger questions to chew on than whodunnit.What that does, however, is sap the satisfaction of watching him expertly crack the puzzle, because the movie spends so much time centering Poirot’s crisis of confidence. A Haunting in Venice’s tone switch to serious horror is also at odds with the campily bad accents and mostly overwrought acting from the (much less starry than usual) cast. It’s not the same kind of reliable guilty pleasure we expect these vehicles to be, then, but this outing of Branagh’s Poirot is at least an interesting experiment in expanding these stories' usual limits.

Tagged by Netflix as a stylish thriller driven by a bold sexual adventure, Burning Betrayal feels less erotic and less thrilling than expected. Sure, there are stunning sex scenes, and unexplainable incidents that seem at first the result of a breakup. However, the first half of Burning Betrayal does not adequately set up the last half, as it focused nearly half its runtime just throwing in as much sex scenes as possible. And for what? There’s nothing character-wise that makes any of the men in Babi’s life so compelling, even in the toxic, addictive sort of way. And when the twist comes, it feels like it’s been all thrown arbitrarily. It really just feels like multiple pretty music videos masquerading as a movie.

Genre: Drama, Mystery, Romance

Actor: Bruno Montaleone, Camilla de Lucas, Giovanna Lancellotti, Leandro Lima, Louise D'Tuani, Micael Borges

Director: Diego Freitas

Rating: R

For almost the entirety of its runtime, Old Dads feels like it has something it's desperately trying to prove. But while the millennial generation and a newfound popular interest in political correctness are ripe for satire, this film chooses the lowest hanging fruit possible to make jokes about—inventing one senseless situation after another in order to laugh at people's "sensitivity" with little energy or wit. The main cast has tried and tested talent, but the material they're working with feels more artificial and whiny than truly perceptive of today's generational clashes. The movie tries to manufacture some sort of dramatic realization by the end, but it hardly changes the protagonists anyway. A film need not be PC to be good, of course, but it should at least stand for something instead of simply standing against so much.

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Actor: Abbie Cobb, Angela Gulner, Bill Burr, Bobby Cannavale, Bokeem Woodbine, Bruce Dern, C. Thomas Howell, Cameron Kelly, Carl Tart, Chelsea Marie Davis, Cody Renee Cameron, Dash McCloud, Erin Wu, Jackie Tohn, Josh Brener, Justene Alpert, Justin Miles, Katie Aselton, Katrina Bowden, Leland Heflin, Miles Robbins, Natasha Leggero, Paul Walter Hauser, Rachael Harris, Reign Edwards, Rick Glassman, Rory Scovel, Steph Tolev, Tom Allen

Director: Bill Burr

Rating: R