A J Lattimer & Co. - Michael Reidy

  Watching The Billion Dollar Art Hunt (BBC iPlayer) is a hugely frustrating way to spend an hour. At the end of an IKEA assembly puzzle of equal length, you have a piece of furniture. At the end of this documentary, all you have are the same questions that were posed at the beginning: Where are the bloody paintings, and who took them? The show, led by veteran art journalist, John Wilson, examines the case of the most spectacular art heist in history: the theft of fourteen pictures from the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, in Boston, in 1990. Estimates are that the paintings are now worth nearly a billion dollars. Of course, these are sensationalised prices. The major paintings were cut from their frames, and probably rolled, possibly even folded. The prints and watercolours may have fared better, but the major paintings are damaged goods and have probably not been looked after in the intervening thirty years. The circumstances of the robbery are well-documented, so I am not ...

  I hate not finishing a book. No matter how much I am not enjoying it, or how badly written it is, I feel personally defeated when I set it aside and take it to the Oxfam shop. At my advanced age, I feel this less keenly and am more ready to blame the book than my own ability to read (tolerate) it. The various travel restrictions with virtually enforced iPlayer, Netflix and Prime watching, have led me to apply this principle to films and television shows. Unfortunately, the list of these that I have never finished viewing grows daily - to the extent that I am cancelling Netflix as soon as I finish watching Midnight Diner . The latest casualty is David Hare's Roadkill (BBC iPlayer).  Great cast, high production values, dramatic filming and editing  - and dull, boring, grim and pointless script. I made it through one and a half episodes. If it's not good by then, it's never going to be. I was anticipating an elegant, witty script such as Hare had done in the Worricker tril...

  I haven't posted many (any?) film reviews because none has struck me as good enough or bad enough to be worth the effort. Unfortunately, Enola Holmes  (Netflix)comes in the latter category. Now, it's pretty hard to mess up a Sherlock Holmes mash-up. Indeed, there have been many highly successful and amusing such films over the years from The Seven Percent Solution , They Might Be Giants ,  Young Sherlock Holmes  to Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and the Canadian TV series, The Adventures of Shirley Holmes . Of course, the Mark Gatiss/Stephen Moffat series Sherlock deftly combined humour, wit, adventure with a 21st century spin to give us stories that delighted and exasperated in nearly equal measure. There are others, as well as the straight adaptations of the stories. Masquerading as a ripping yarn for young adults, the bottom line is that Enola Holmes is a woke diatribe. Rich, white, establishment men are bad; young rebel...