When the Sherlock series first debuted a couple of years ago on the BBC Maria and I almost missed it. Surprising because we’re both huge fans of both Sherlock Holmes and British detective dramas in general. This time around, for the second series of Sherlock, we were on the ball. And waiting.

The first 90-minute installment in the three-episode second series run is called ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’ and like the mysteries from the last season it’s a take off on a familiar Sherlock story with a whole bunch of twists and turns.

Sherlock and Watson find themselves confronted with a number of mysteries from an outdoorsman killed by a backfiring car to a dead man in a trunk to a dominatrix trying to bring down the British monarchy. It’s a bit of an everything goes but, of course, like any good Sherlock story it all works itself out in the end and ties itself together in a neat little package.

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I am a huge fan of Ethan and Joel Coen, you must understand. I also enjoy myself a good Western. So when I heard that the Coen brothers were working on a Western, I flipped.

When I first saw the trailers for True Grit, I had a pretty good idea about what I thought the film would be. I pictured something right smack in between No Country for Old Men and O Brother Where Art Thou. Somewhere between a gritty, thriller-drama in the desert and a bumbling odyssey adventure with upright pianos and barn burnings. This, I thought, would be cinema perfection.

True Grit, however, ended up being anything but perfection and despite the Oscar nod—despite the laudable performance by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld—I found it to be a pretty disappointing film.

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I stumbled across the new BBC series Sherlock by accident. Frankly, I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about it earlier. Both Maria and I are huge Sherlock Holmes fans, and huge mystery fans in general, but somehow this slipped passed our radar.

For as long as there have been moving pictures, there have been adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Some have been brilliant. Some have been otherwise. Some have depicted Holmes as rather tame and mild-mannered. Others, like Guy Ritchie’s interpretation, have picked up on Holmes’ lesser savoury habits and tendencies. But the BBC’s Sherlock depicts the famous detective, and his affable partner, in an entirely new way.

Sherlock is an adaptation of the classic Holmes franchise set in modern-day London.

Of course, upon first hearing the premise—a modern day adaptation of Sherlock Holmes—you might scoff, I know I did, but after giving it a chance I found that I would be more than rebuffed. This series, in fact, is brilliant.

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Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes was an incredible ride, the whole way through.

As a die hard Sherlock Holmes fan, and not a fan of Diehard, I approached this movie with trepidation. Guy Ritchie is a skillful director, a master, in my opinion, but can be tasteless, violent and crude at times, too. I worried, as did the rest of Holmes’ devoted fans, what he might do once he got his hands on the franchise of the world’s greatest sleuth. In the end, I needn’t have worried, for Holmes was in very good hands.
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