A joy to watch
I absolutely wanted to own the episode entitled 'taken by the flood' in which Elliot Cowan manages the feat of playing the most attractive ,charismatic and frightening villain that ever existed.How his character can fascinate and repulse at the same time is incredible!Cowan does it with a nonchalance and an aplomb that is not to be found in an average actor.The other episodes, although not as good, are very entertaining nonetheless and shot with such lavish spendour that they are a joy to watch. Added to this is the masterful performance of David Suchet who wears Poirot like a second skin.Settings, costumes, performances, everything is first class, the only very slight problem being Suchet's English accent which can sometimes be heard when he speaks French.

A MUST HAVE!!!!
If you have not bought this masterpiece of a serie yet, you just have to run to the nearest dvd shop to take David Suchet remarkable performance home with you. He is one heck of an actor! I love every one of his mistyries, especially the one-and-half hour ones. These episodes really gets your mind going, or as Hercule Poirot would have said: the little gray cels. But instead of buying one serie at the time, you should rather buy the whole lot! If buying the whole Poirot collection, you get 52 episodes. One unforgetable episode after the other.
Poirot is what I call GOOD CRIME. It's worth every shilling! :)



Poirot's change in direction
The 2006 feature length episodes;

The Blue train
Cards on the table
Taken at the flood
After the funeral

Great stories, but the change of direction to a slightly darker feel may not be for all fans of the earlier stories where the tone was lighter with some subtle humour in.

However, Suchet has his firm hold on the character of Poirot and is a delight to watch.

I am looking forward to the next four installments due for 2008;

Titles rumoured to be;

Mrs. McGinty's Dead
Cat amoung the pigeons?
Hallowe'en Party
Third Girl

I suspect that these will follow a similar trend of 2 hour specials with the darker feel. It would be nice if they had the original theme music and Hastings/Japp/Lemon featured with a little lite interplay between the main characters...

So beautifully done, only the packaging is a shame
These new Poirots are so well and beautifully done (5+ stars!!!). Yes, they are darker and more emotional (sader) than the short stories, mostly due to the soundtrack and the much deeper story. Murder, greed, jealousy or rage are sad things anyway. Poirot himself says in "After the Funeral" that he is interested in psychology: why and how do people things. But this enriches the whole series.

David Suchet still dominates every scene he is in, and the supporting cast is simply perfect as well (and as always). No miscasted actor, no bad or exaggerated acting.

The video quality is very good, the aspect ratio is 16:9 (the first 8 seasons or so were 4:3). The sound Dolby Surround (not 5.1).

There is a "Behind the Scenes" feature on every of the four disks. But this is done not very well (3 stars): Granada obviously made ONE feature of one hour length and cut it into FOUR pieces. So in the "making of" on "After the Funeral" we get also information (spoilers!) about "Cards on the Table", the same with the other ones. Still, there ARE some features and we get to know from David Suchet how he approaches the Poirot figure.

Packaging is a REAL SHAME (1 star): No information about the films (length, aspect ratio, sound, date of broadcast), no summary of the stories. To save space in your DVD shelf they let two of the discs overlap each other so you have to take out disc 2 to get disc 1. But after all it's the wonderful content that counts and not the inferior packaging box!

How dismal
These episodes are just too depressing ! They lay too much stress on having stars in them talking about romance rather than Poirot getting stuck into solving the murder . Cards On The Table is a clever novel but this TV version is poor as too many liberties are taken with it . Like Murder On The Orient Express in 1974 Cards On The Table was a brilliant book that could have been done for film without any really big alterations .They included things that were not in the novel which did not enhance the TV version . If something is fine as it is why ruin it with PC modernisation ? Taken At The Flood would have been better for a few scenes with Hasting's ( As in Murder In Messomptania )& Poirot while Japp could have had a number of scenes in The Blue Train Mystery ( like he did in Hercule Poirot's Christmas ) . This batch of Poirot episodes represent a change for the worse with After The Funeral being the best of a badly excecuted series . As in The Hollow Poirot looks bored & marginalised as various over-rated ' stars' try to 'act ' out scenes of a romantic & dreary nature . That should have been cut as the producers should have considered what the fans wanted rather than changing things for the sake of it .After The Funeral is most like how things where in the 1990's and so is the best . If they had wanted an actress who is brilliant at playing an author who helps solve crime why not ask Angela Lansbury who did a first rate job playing a character who was a mixture of Mrs Oliver & Miss Marple ( i.e.Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote ) and who can therefore play that sort of part convincingly . Zoe Wannamaker was the wrong choice as Mrs Oliver - at least Jean Stapleton provided some comic relief in Dead Man's Folly . Zoe Wannamaker cannot even do that !

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