DEAD AGAIN (1991)

DEAD AGAIN (R) The young Irish-born actor-director Kenneth Branagh has crafted an exhilarating romantic murder mystery. Branagh plays cheerful, tough-around- the-edges Los Angeles detective Mike Church, and Emma Thompson is the amnesiac woman he's been asked to investigate. As it turns out, the two characters are the reincarnations of Raymond and Margaret Strauss (also played by Branagh and Thompson), a mysterious '40s couple whose marriage ended in murder. We see the marriage in flashback-it's given the choreographed opulence of a classic Hollywood melodrama-and Branagh then cuts back and forth between the two stories, creating a pop-culture ripple effect between present and past. Dead Again gets you giggling at what a contraption it is (the plot is all blithe, symmetrical happenstance), yet it keeps you completely engrossed. Branagh, a cheeky showman, loves the primal pleasures of narrative. He builds a castle in the air out of Hollywood cliches. A

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