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Very well executed

Expected more

Excellent adaptation.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Interesting fictional account of the mysterious disappearance of noted mystery writer Agatha Christie. Vanessa Redgrave portrays the gifted writer whose life becomes one of turmoil when her husband announces that he wants a divorce to wed another woman.Christie disappears to a hotel with an adjoining health spa where she plots to kill herself. Dustin Hoffman is the American writer who was to interview Christie on the day of her disappearance.Thanks to the maid, he traces her to the spa and professes love for her. They dance together as he tries to get her out of her depression.To me, height was a problem here. Hoffman is shorter than Redgrave and you felt that in their scenes together.

Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best. Maybe Agatha Christie back in 1926 just wanted to get a way for a bit and at the same time give her estranged husband a bit of a bad time. To this day we don't know what happened to the famed author for those dozen days in 1926 when she left her rather expensive ride abandoned and disappeared. Leaves a lot of room for speculation.Which is what Agatha is, pure speculation. During her disappearance where shortly before she learned that husband Timothy Dalton had been out stepping with his secretary, Vanessa Redgrave as Agatha had an appointment with American gossip columnist Dustin Hoffman who's a Walter Winchell type and so gauche as versus these very well mannered and upper class British.Hoffman turns an investigative reporter, something Winchell never was as he was always relying on press agent tips and proves better than the police as personified by Timothy West.But this is all whole cloth folks, Christie's heirs attempted to sue.It's a nice ensemble piece of work Agatha with both Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman giving most believable performances. Well, it could have happened that way.

I am not normally a great fan of films which offer a purported solution to a real-life mystery. I found David Fincher's recent "Zodiac", about a real-life serial killer who terrorised San Francisco during the sixties and seventies, dull, and did not like the way in which it reversed the presumption of innocence by proclaiming that the killer was a real (although conveniently dead) individual who was suspected of the crimes but never put on trial. Then we have all those attempts to answer old chestnuts like "Who was Jack the Ripper?" and "What is the truth about the assassination of President Kennedy?", films which are generally longer on speculation than on fact and which rarely shed much light on the mysteries in question."Agatha" is another film of this type. It revolves around the disappearance of novelist Agatha Christie for eleven days in December 1926; she disappeared from her Berkshire home and was later found staying under an assumed name in a hotel in the Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate. The affair gave rise to a frenzy of media speculation at the time, and Christie never said what she had been doing during those eleven days or offered an explanation for her disappearance. The fictitious explanation offered by the film is that Christie, who had just discovered that her husband Archibald was having an affair, went to Harrogate in order to commit suicide but was prevented from doing so by Wally Stanton, a (presumably) fictitious American journalist who befriended her.The best thing about the film is its lavish recreation of 1920s Britain, but I found it had little else to offer. Neither of its stars, Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman, seem to be stretched by their material. What surprises me is why the producers should have felt that this particular story was worthy of being made into a film. As a romance? There is some mild flirtation between Agatha and Wally, but this is kept very low-key. As a thriller? Hardly. When the film was shown in cinemas in 1979 Agatha Christie had died only three years earlier at the age of eighty-five. Most of the audience, therefore, would have been well aware that, whatever might have happened to her in Harrogate, she had not come to any serious harm, and there would consequently have been little suspense.The question the film raises is not so much "What happened to Agatha Christie in 1926?" but rather "Does anyone still care what happened to Agatha Christie in 1926?" At least the Ripper murders and the Kennedy assassination, to judge by the multitude of books and websites devoted to them, still arouse plenty of controversy today. There is no such interest in the Christie disappearance, which was in all likelihood the result of emotional stress consequent upon the breakdown of her marriage. This film is not so much a puzzle without a solution as a solution without a puzzle. 4/10

This film is about the "disappearance" of Agatha Christie in 1926. It matches what is known about this episode pretty well. What happened was that Mrs. Christie's husband was having an affair, and making little effort to hide it. Her car was found abandoned near a lake, with her ID and other possessions strewn about. She checked into a health spa under the surname of her husband's mistress for about eleven days. There was a big uproar in the press, and some of the spa's other guests noticed the likeness to Christie of the stranger there but she just laughed it off. When she returned she claimed amnesia, but no one believed that. She never spoke of the episode again, and it is not mentioned in her autobiography. (There is no evidence that her husband's mistress was at that spa.) At least the film says up-front that the story told is "speculation". In these times of historical fabrications by the likes of Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg, that is a bit refreshing. Having said all that, this is an OK film. Vanessa Redgrave does her usual top-notch acting. It was fun seeing Dustin Hoffman Hitting on her, and dancing with her, him being at least six inches shorter.