Enola Holmes 3 (2026)

The third entry in the Enola Holmes franchise arrives with the series' customary bustle and a fresh inventory of grievances. Enola travels to Malta to marry Tewkesbury, only for Sherlock to vanish and a dying soldier's last word to send her chasing a professor who is not what she claims to be. The casting is color-conscious in the manner now standard for period pieces that would prefer the nineteenth century to have looked more like the twenty-first. Sharon Duncan-Brewster presides as Moriarty. Himesh Patel takes up the role of Dr. Watson. Maltese performers fill the local ranks. Nobody in the film remarks upon any of it, which is the arrangement, and the production honors it without fuss.

Much of the running time belongs to Enola's insistence that a wedding ring need not cost her a career, a position her brother disputes and her mother, a militant suffragette, would endorse with a banner. The mystery concerns a cache of Afghan gold lifted by British officers during a fabricated battle and smuggled to Malta, where it has sat for decades behind war medals and polite silence. The villains are imperial. The heroes are anti-colonial, and the resolution returns the treasure to Afghanistan with a solemnity that permits no ambiguity. Tewkesbury renounces his title and his seat in the House of Lords. The film regards this as a triumph, and it is difficult to argue the point.

The trouble is the speeches. Characters explain the moral of the story to one another at length, and the audience is trusted to keep pace only if it is told twice. Critics were divided, praising Millie Bobby Brown's composure while lamenting a plot that plods from clue to clue. The picture is a competent adventure carrying a conscience it will not stop announcing. The series has grown up, and it would now like credit for having done so.