In weiter Ferne, so nah! (Wim Wenders, 1993)

Faraway, So Close! picks up from where Wings of Desire left off six years earlier, with Cassiel, the angel who'd decided against giving up his wings, now forced to do so to rescue a girl falling from a balcony. He has tremendous difficulty adjusting to the limitations of life as a human, and then falls in with a gangster to boot.

All the main characters from the 1987 film show up, including Peter Falk with another cameo as himself, and likewise Lou Reed and Mikhail Gorbachev. Nastassja Kinski and Willem Dafoe as otherworldly observers are given one ponderous speech after another to deliver about time, human perception and purpose.

Wenders also wants to use the fact that the Wall has fallen since the first film to say something meaningful, but clearly doesn't know what that is, and having overtly succumbed to Christianity in the interim has also muddled his mind, since it's now stuffed in as part of the message at every possible opportunity. The strong supporting cast and sprinkles of humour are compensations, but it's overlong, totally unfocussed and very reliant on continued goodwill accrued by its masterpiece of a predecessor, which it adds nothing to in terms of substance.

5/10

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice (BenDavid Grabinski, 2026)

This one requires tolerance of two Vince Vaughns, because a time travel MacGuffin sends one from six months in the future back to the present to correct the mistakes of his current gangster self. Of course that means it's a comedy, and with the gangster theme also extremely violent, to the point of taking anything that the John Wick films get away with for granted. The baseline is thus firmly in the region of The Hangover franchise, but the sci-fi twist adds a lot and playing around with any other stock elements of various genres is genuinely entertaining.

6/10

45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)

Those 45 years being how long Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay have been married, and are about to celebrate their wedding anniversary until she discovers that he lost a German partner in an accident years before they met, and would probably have married her first instead. She accordingly becomes fixated on the idea that their whole marriage has been a sham of sorts, unable to process what she's learnt, in an alarmingly adolescent way.

Rampling has always specialised in unsympathetic characters, and this is no exception. The performances by the couple are strong and very true to life, but dramatically it's all as flat as the Norfolk Broads that they live in.

6/10

Enola Holmes 3 (Philip Barantini, 2026)

So, the Sherlock's little sister bandwagon rolls on, and this time she's getting married to a toff on Malta, which of course immediately gets derailed by her brother being kidnapped. Directorial duties have now been handed over to the man behind the estimable Boiling Point and Adolescence, so it could be supposed that there'd be a concomitant shift to seriousness after the enjoyable frivolity of the first two films. But instead the change of setting away from the vividly-realised Victorian London of parts I and II robs the enterprise of much of its charm, which it doesn't compensate for with a thin plot with little proper detective work, flabby action sequences and a vague anti-imperialist message. The lively performances and dialogue are still there, but the franchise really can't keep going on the strength of these alone.

5/10