Maigret's Night At The Crossroads (2017)

Perhaps Rowan Atkinson was trying here to present an especially sad Maigret given the story opens upon the funeral of a police colleague, but he is so flat, so deadpan, so morose - even more so than usual - that this episode of the usually thrilling 2016 and 2017 Maigret series is the rather flat and ponderous one of the four - at some points you wonder if the actors are speaking as slowly as they are just to try to stretch the story to movie-length and this lethargic pacing is at odds with the outlandish characters, one of them scarred and hissing like a Bond villain and another a stammering cartoon who do not fit well against the backdrop of gritty Paris and its mid-50s period detail.

★★☆☆☆

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Maigret In Montemartre (2017)

One of two movie-length episodes in the 2017 second season of the Rowan Atkinson-helmed adaptations of Georges Simenon's Maigret stories, this one, based on 'Maigret And The Strangled Stripper', is another rivetting crime melodrama set in a terrifically realised gritty 1950s Paris full of morphine-addled prostitutes, rent boys, showgirls and grubby bohemes, and I think it again terrifically captures the feel of Simenon's spare writing and I think Rowan Atkinson is Maigret leapt-to-life from Simenon's pages. 

★★★★☆

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Maigret's Dead Man (2016)

It's not French and Rowan Atkinson isn't being funny but once you've got your head around these immediate incongruities, the 2016 series of Maigret tv movies is terrific viewing - fans of the Georges Simenon books and fans of tv murder mysteries in general will find the episodes as thrilling as they are taut (like the wee slips of the books, there is not a wasted word or moment) and the plots are deliciously grim, as is evident in this episode which features a death count of at least twenty - three remote farm massacres are somehow linked to the death of a man outside a cafe in the Place de la Concorde.

★★★★☆

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