So 2009’s Holmes certainly got the full Ritchie treatment – the question is, did it work? In our opinion, the result wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. Sure, there are a lot of action sequences, and the staid Holmes of old seems now to have morphed into a buff athlete and martial arts expert played by Robert Downey Jr. Yet despite this, we were hard-pressed to find a moment in the entire film where we weren’t either having a chuckle or glued to the screen.

Joel Silver has announced to the LA Times that Guy Ritchie set to be back for the second Sherlock Holmes film. With Robert Downey Jr. having recently dropped out of John Favreau’s inelegantly-titled Cowboys And Aliens, it seems the Baker Street boys are having a sequel rushed through production. There’s already plot info in the works, and with Ritchie dropping his current project Lobo, we’d be highly surprised if we didn’t see Homles 2 sometime in the latter half of the year…

It was about time Sherlock Holmes got the Hollywood treatment – audiences have been continually fascinated with Arthur Conan Doyle’s series of short detective stories through the years, yet they undoubtedly needed a little sexing up to succeed with a modern audience. Enter Guy Ritchie, whose new action-packed adaptation is certainly a departure from the original series, but nonetheless entertaining in its own right. The screenplay has enough intelligence not to completely insult fans of Conan Doyle’s stories, and it’s perfectly complemented by Downey Jr’s sarcastic, slightly camp take on Sherlock. This adaptation won’t set the world on fire, but it’s a fine two hours entertainment for a dreary winter’s night.

We can’t help but notice that Hollywood loves to up the explosion-and-sex factor with Britain’s classic literature. One only needs to look at the bare chest of Robert Downey Jr as the new Sherlock Holmes to see that the silver screen doesn’t mind taking a few liberties. But what other classic-but-uncool tales are Hollywood missing out on? We re-imagine some great British classics the way Spielberg would do ’em…

Terry Gilliam’s nonsensical fantasy is a stunning sight to behold, but the spectre of Heath Ledger’s death during filming, and his below-par performance, is a hard thing to escape.