I SAY, HOLMES, IS THAT YOUR SISTER?!
Enola Holmes (Netflix) Verdict: Solid family fun ★★★✩✩ Blackbird (digital download, 15) Verdict: Mawkish and unconvincing ★★✩✩✩
IT WOULD come as news to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but Enola Holmes is Sherlock’s younger sister, invented by the American author Nancy Springer and now incarnated on screen by the talented British actress Millie Bobby Brown. She is also, at the tender age of 16, one of the producers of a film envisaged as the first of, that dreaded word, a franchise.
Brown is splendid as the spirited Enola, raised by her mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter) to be resourceful and selfsufficient: not for nothing does Enola spell ‘Alone’ backwards.
Bonham Carter gives one of those performances as a wild-haired maverick that she could probably knock off before breakfast; while a top-notch supporting cast also includes Henry Cavill as Sherlock, Sam Claflin as the other Holmes brother, Mycroft, and a couple of grand theatrical powerhouses in Fiona Shaw and Frances de la Tour. But this is Brown’s show, to the extent that director Harry Bradbeer, whose credits most significantly feature the TV drama Fleabag, gets her ‘doing a Fleabag’ by conspiratorially glancing directly at the camera.
It is becoming an overused device but here it helps the narrative romp along, as Enola runs away to London to escape her cruel governess ( Shaw) and, more importantly, to find her mother, who has mysteriously disappeared.
Written by Jack Thorne, whose own most significant credit in the context of this film is probably the stage production
Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, it is all highly contrived, anachronistically presenting Enola as a very modern kind of adventurer while cramming in every possible late-Victorian cliché. But it’s also solid family fun.
BLACKBIRD has a great cast, too, but sadly in the service of a mawkish story, a remake of a Danish film about a woman, Lily (Susan Sarandon) in the grip of a terrible degenerative disease, whose doctor husband (Sam Neill) has agreed to carry out a mercy killing.
Kate Winslet and Mia Wasikowska play her daughters, and Lindsay Duncan her best friend from college days. Just as promisingly, the director is Roger Michell, who made Notting Hill and the excellent forthcoming film The Duke.
But Blackbird, despite heart-tugging moments, is a disappointment: an unconvincing, unevenly scripted family drama.