Customer Reviews
A joy to watch - By: H. Lacroix, 03 Oct 2008 
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 & frightening villain that ever existed.How his character can fascinate & repulse at the same time is incredible!Cowan does it with a nonchalance & an aplomb that is not to be foundin an average actor.The other episodes, although not as good, are very entertaining nonetheless & 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!!!! - By: DK., 17 Aug 2008 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 - By: Paul Smith, 04 May 2008 
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 & 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 & Hastings/Japp/Lemon featured with a little lite interplay between the main characters...
So beautifully done, only the packaging is a shame - By: Matthias von Herrmann, 18 Nov 2007 These new Poirots are so well & beautifully done (5+ stars!!!). Yes, they are darker & more emotional (sader) than the short stories, mostly due to the soundtrack & the much deeper story. Murder, greed, jealousy or rage are sad things anyway. Poirot himself saysin "After the Funeral" that he is interestedin psychology: why & how do people things. But this enriches the whole series.
David Suchet still dominates every scene he is in, & 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 & cut it into FOUR pieces. Soin 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 & 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 spacein 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 & not the inferior packaging box!
How dismal - By: Mr. Mg Reynolds, 27 Oct 2007 
These episodes are just too depressing ! They lay too much stress on having starsin 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 Expressin 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 notin 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 ( Asin Murder In Messomptania )& Poirot while Japp could have had a number of scenesin The Blue Train Mystery ( like he didin 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 . Asin 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 wherein the 1990's & 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 Fletcherin Murder She Wrote ) & 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 reliefin Dead Man's Folly . Zoe Wannamaker cannot even do that !
