Murder by Decree (1979)

There's only one way the Jack the Ripper mystery can be resolved in a movie without history being completely upended, so don't expect too many surprises here, but expect a gripping mystery drama that has Sherlock Holmes (Christopher Plummer, who bewilders with his simpering, "feely" portrayal of the great detective) investigating the notorious Jack the Ripper murders and, once he's talked to, among others, Donald Sutherland's psychic and John Gielgud's parliamentarian, Holmes arrives at a solution that any audience member even half interested in the grisly episode will have come across before.

★★★★☆

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Enola Holmes (2020)

The sister of the famous Baker Street detective, a character dreamt up by author Nancy Springer for a series of teen detective novels, is brought up outside the conventions of turn-of-the-century Britain and so as a young adult is perfectly equipped with the sass, street-smarts and probing scientific mind needed to solve a mystery - her mother disappears and a Marquess disappears and our hero, Enola, embarks on a rollicking, satisfying (well, mostly...not including the underdeveloped plot thread regarding Helena Bonham Carter's character) adventure through a London on the cusp of a sweeping social change.

★★★★☆

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Terror By Night (1946)

This time, in number thirteen of the fourteen movies in the series, Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes boards a train to Scotland that is transporting the Star of Rhodesia, a jewel of great value, and although he succeeds in thwarting would-be thieves, a body turns up in one of the carriages.

★★★☆☆

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The Woman In Green (1945)

Anyone wondering exactly when it became acceptable for cinema to treat women as the disposable objects of men who slash and chop them will be dismayed to watch this 1945 Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movie (number 11 of 14) because its mystery of attractive women in London turning up dead minus their fingers has the police suspecting a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer but when Sherlock Holmes gets to the bottom of things, the solution he reveals is a grim social indictment that suggests long before the modern slasher women were being slaughtered in cinema for the flimsiest reasons imaginable.

★★★★☆

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Dressed To Kill (UK: Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Code) (1946)

By 1946, Basil Rathbone had starred as Sherlock Holmes alongside Nigel Bruce's Doctor Watson fourteen times and perhaps some weariness is on display in this last one, Dressed To Kill, but to be fair, the plot about a criminal gang's race to obtain three identical wooden music boxes, based on Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, gives Sherlock Holmes no opportunity to dazzle with his brilliant methods of deduction because the audience knows pretty much what it needs to know right from the beginning and remains always several steps ahead of the great detective.

★★☆☆☆

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The House of Fear (1945)

As in Conan Doyle's The Five Orange Pips, the arrival of a series of envelopes containing orange pips portends the grisly death of each recipient but where there are three deaths in the Openshaw family in the short story, there is a body count of seven in this film - a lot for a movie with a runtime of 69 minutes - and although it's good fun and Basil Rathbone is Sidney Paget's illustration of Sherlock Holmes come-to-life, and although the movie is deliciously spooky and the murders unspeakably gruesome - details that murder mystery fans will relish - the rush of deliveries of 'orange pip letters' one after the other after the other to a diminishing group of members of the Good Comrades Club seated night after night at their dining table in the gothic Drearcliff House gets a touch repetitive and ridiculous after, say, the first three.

★★★★☆

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The Scarlet Claw (1944)

The opening credits attribute the "original" story to a pair of plagiarists, suggesting they've only based their plot on the characters of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but anyone can see the debt this eighth of the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies owes The Hound of the Baskervilles with its murder on the foggy moors committed by a phosphorescent monster; however, before you groan at having watched it all before, remember Basil Rathbone in black-and-white is Sidney Paget's illustrations come-to-life, and here Holmes - on the hunt for a villain as diabolical as any seen in cinema to 1944 - becomes involved in some deliciously creepy scenes including one so good it was used again by Scorsese in his Cape Fear 47 years later.

★★★★☆

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Without A Clue (1988)

Full of laughs but light on mystery, this comedy posits that Ben Kingsley's Dr Watson is the real great detective of 221B Baker Street - he merely attributes his genius for solving mysteries to the mythologised Sherlock Holmes of his stories - while his colleague who presents himself as Sherlock Holmes to the adoring London public is an out-of-his-depth, drunken, womanising dolt played by Michael Caine. 

★★★☆☆

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Mr Holmes (2015)

The themes of memory, fact and fiction are explored in this movie that elaborates on the Sherlock Holmes canon, imagining the great detective at 90-odd years of age vexed by an unsolved case, but the movie's three distinct story threads are each so frustratingly thin - and in one important area, so unconvincing - that the impact of the interesting loftier themes is lessened.

★★☆☆☆

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Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011)

Robert Downey Jr mumbles incomprehensibly through most of it but this second instalment of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes series is great fun and with murderous Turkish cossacks, gypsies, and turn-of-the-century science and technology, it stays true to the core look, feel and themes of Arthur Conan Doyle's creation.

★★★☆☆

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