This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Unlike other reviewers, I haven't read any of the Inspector Gamache series. But I love Nathaniel Parker, so I watched this.Have to say it was a big bust.It was directed in a static fashion and moved slowly. Also, the acting was pretty bad.Even the mystery wasn't impressive, at least the way it was set up.An elderly woman is killed in the woods by an arrow; she was beloved in the community, so who could have killed her and why?Inspector Gamache (Parker) investigates. Someone called this "Inspector Lynley Goes to Quebec." I didn't find Parker like Inspector Lynley, who had quite a temper and wasn't anywhere as near as quiet as Gamache.The characters were not well fleshed out. All in all, kind of a waste. Reminded me of the Canadian films of Mary Higgins Clark movies - not well done.

As other reviewers have already mentioned the glaring casting errors, accent and general acting (or lack there of), I can't believe the production mistakes that got through. 1. Jane was clearly shot in through the left side of her chest, not through the heart as Nicholl stated. 2. When Beauvoir requested Gamache's weapon and badge, Gamache handed him the gun with the barrel pointing right at him. Procedure would have been to turn the gun and hand it over by the grip. 3. Ruth and Jane hardly looked like they could have been classmates. Ruth was at least well-cast even if poorly written. If there is ever a 2nd film I hope they do better in every aspect.

I wanted to like this movie, having read all of Louise Penney's atmospheric, intelligent, introspective books featuring Armand Gamache. How disappointing to find that all that has been reduced to soap opera standards. There is in the movie none of the sensitivity, insight, philosophizing that makes the books so compelling. The cast is impossibly good looking, with that plastic, every-hair-in-place, perfect make-up at all times look so common to made-for-TV movies. The characters, instead of being complex and unpredictable, are stilted, their utterances short, too fast, emotionless--a sign of poor direction and/or poor acting. The use of that husky, almost-whisper voice (who talks like that?) also betrays the cookie-cutter approach to this movie. Scenes are very short, pushing the plot ahead in only the barest, least thought-provoking manner. It's a shame to see Penney's deeply thoughtful works reduced to such shallowness. It was peculiar, as well, to see what Penney describes as the surreal, provocative artwork of murder-victim Jane,(thus killing off a main and recurring character in the books) represented as poorly-rendered American Primitive. Have the producers/director no loyalty to the books at all? If Penney is one of the executive producers, as referred to in other reviews, I cannot imagine that she feels the movie faithfully represents her literary work. I doubt, too, that she had much to say about it.

This picture was not a disappointment -- it was a travesty. If I were Louise Penny I would be on a rampage. This picture was miscast, stilted and perfunctory. How the charm and sensuality of the book could be intentionally reduced to this abomination is a testament only to the consistency of a lackluster effort. Maybe a mini series could manage the subtleties and nuances of the books. Really this could have been filmed anywhere - New England, the North Carolina mountains -- there was no flavor of a Canadian village so carefully created in the books. Gamache was reduced to a bilious sort of sourpuss and Jean Guy was more Miami Vice than Sûreté Du Québec.