Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

And Then There Were None

There have been four big screen adaptation of Agatha Christie’s legendary And Then There Were None, but it’s taken the BBC to finally turn a two-part miniseries into the best version to date.

Anyone who’s read the book and the stage adaptation knows that the two have entirely different endings. The book doesn’t hold any pretense about being dark and fascinating, one of the most surprising and compelling finales in literature. While all prior adaptations have focused on the happier ending of the stage play, this miniseries sticks to the book’s conclusion. The story, about ten men and women who are invited to an island off the coast of England to be confronted by a killer who wants to murder ten people whose crimes were never adequately prosecuted, the guests are slaughtered one by one as prescribed by a children’s nursery rhyme about ten little soldier boys.

The body county rises slowly in the first film taking out only three of the collected criminals. However, the last half is a veritable blood bath. The guests shift from believing there’s someone else on the island to suspecting that one of the others is involved. All of the twists and turns that made the novel great remain largely intact, manipulated and adjusted as needed to ratchet up tension and suspense.

The assembled cast present version of the Christie characters that are complex, fascinating and realistic. These are characters whose actions are psychologically fitting. Each victim’s crime is presented in flashback, preventing any of them from generating genuine sympathy with the audience. Apart from some perplexing details, such as the giant pit in the island, which is visited twice in the first half and ignored in the second, the film’s faithful recreation of the book’s rich narrative is a welcome change of pace.

Released 70 years after Rene Clair’s prominent first adaptation of the novel, this adaptation easily puts that film and its successors to shame. There may yet be another great adaptation to come, but for now, there has never been a finer example.