"Director Bill Condon's poignant and witty meditation on memory and ageing dispenses with the usual Holmes trappings. Now 93, retired and living in a ramshackle pile on the cliffs above the English Channel, he spends his time bee-keeping under the increasingly vexed eye of his housekeeper Mrs Munro (Linney) but still finds time to entertain her young son Roger (Parker).
"However, there is one case from thirty years back that still irks him. The marriage of a young couple (Morahan and Kennedy) is feeling the strain after a couple of miscarriages and suddenly the grieving mother goes missing.
"Holmes' recollection is increasingly stymied by the ongoing effects of senility, so much so that he even travels to post-war Hiroshima in search of a plant that apparently has memory-restoring properties.
"All these strands are cleverly brought together in a sweetly sad adaptation of Mitch Cullin's 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind with McKellen relishing a role flits from cantankerous old git to gentle soul.
"It's a scintillatingly humane drama that's structured cleverly using the tropes of the traditional Holmes story yet taking the character in directions where he can rue his lack of imagination in a world where he functioned so ably as a coldly logical thinker." - Sky Movies
Tim Evans
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