Micah Lloyd
Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.
Aneesa Wardle
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Roman Sampson
One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.
Lidia Draper
Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.
Prismark10
David Suchet's wish to film all the Poirot stories come to fruition in this final tale written by Agatha Christie where Poirot is now old, ill and knocking on death's door.The setting of the television adaptations has always been the 1930s but here we jump forward to the late 1940s and the post world war 2 setting.Captain Hastings (Hugh Fraser) returns to see his old friend and also his daughter staying in Styles once a grand family house now a hotel. This was also the setting for a murder that Hastings and Poirot once investigated.The look of the film is that of a melancholy gloom, we know that Poirot is reaching the end of the road. In recent television adventures we see Poirot being a pious Catholic and rather absolute that murder is wrong.This has been leading up to something that the producers and even Suchet decided to devise a route map knowing the contents of the final story.Dead bodies turn up, people attempt to kill, even Hastings nearly succumbs to murder given how much he detests his daughter's latest flame. Yet Poirot realises that there is an Iago like person who is pulling the strings and has pulled them before, enough to send someone over the edge while they act all innocent.Poirot uses his little grey cells to lure this person into a trap, a culprit who actually has never killed anyone yet Poirot thinks is dangerous enough that he would contemplate his own eternal soul to be damned.The feature length films lacked the leanness, exquisiteness, humour and stylish look of the hour long adaptations. They only tended hang together in the final reveal of the murderer and how it was all done as in here. Until then the film felt a little disjointed and gloomy.Still it serves as a nice swansong with Suchet leaving a strong mark in his interpretation of Poirot.
youAreCrazyDude
Poirot use to be brilliant. I used to love Poirot. Most recent and latest episodes though feel as if author was on dope and her brain was completely gone, or someone else was writing instead of her. Absurd episodes. This is opinion as if I were Poirot and had to guess what happened to what used to be a brilliant show, but now is completely nonsensical and ran into the ground mush. What is funny that this Review Process is behaving like latest Poirot shows. That is, it demands that I write at least 10 lines. So, I am trying to "water it down", my review, Mon Ami. Just like Poirot was watered-down with nonsensical lines, actions, and other stuff, just to make the show fit into required time length, I presume, Mon Ami.
frankwarren
As a reader of Dame AC for 76 years I always found HP difficult. For me, Suchet's triumph - genius - is in constructing a reality from an impossibility. As for Curtain, it is no surprise that the author delayed publication for 30 years, almost until after her death. Poirot and Hastings have aged beyond recognition and several devices in the novel would appear to be stolen from other stories except that it is actually the other way round. Chandler would probably have called it a reverse cannibalization. The author appears to have taken a strong dislike for her creation and takes her revenge not only on him but on Hastings too who is treated with contempt by both the detective and the daughter. I suspected what my impression would be and should have avoided seeing the production but my curiosity as to how Alice Orr-Ewing would portray Judith was too strong. Curiosity killed the cat.
blanche-2
"Curtain" is the last of the Poirot stories, which means the end of David Suchet's run as Poirot. To me, he will always be the definitive Poirot.Hastings, who has just lost his wife, is asked by Poirot to meet him at Styles, the site of a previous case thirty years earlier - their first.Styles is now a guest house. Poirot's health is failing, and he is confined to a wheelchair, due to his arthritis and bad heart. But he still has all his marbles. He tells Hastings that there is a murderer on the premises, and he needs Hastings to be his eyes and ears. The people there include the owners, Daisy and Colonel Toby Luttrell, a spinster, Elizabeth Cole, an aristocrat, Sir William Boyd Carrington, a birdwatcher Stephen Norton, a womanizer, Major Allerton, a chemist Dr John Franklin and his wife Barbara, her nurse, Nurse Craven, and Dr. Franklin's lab assistant, who just happens to be Hastings' estranged daughter Judith. One of these people is a killer. But can Hastings take his attention off his daughter long enough to help Poirot find him or her? Then the murders start. What does Poirot know? Can he solve his final case before his final curtain? A dark mystery, but a good one, with Poirot's illness permeating the entire episode. The murder in the end is actually the McGuffin - the big story is that this is Poirot's last case. My big complaint is that Miss Lemon and Superintendent Japp were not brought back for the episode.I know some people didn't like the turn this series took, and it's true, the seasons with Miss Lemon and Hastings were the best -- they had humor and lightness as well as mystery. But throughout all the seasons, there were always good episodes.Will be missed.