Cinema Sleuths

20 years later, is Casino Royale still the best Daniel Craig James Bond film? To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of one of the most acclaimed James Bond movies of the modern era, we return to 2006’s Casino Royale for a down-and-dirty investigation into the film that reinvented 007 for a new generation. When Daniel Craig first appeared as James Bond, casting him was controversial. But Casino Ro...

The toys are alive! Your Cinema Sleuths investigate  Toy Story (1995), the groundbreaking Pixar movie that changed animation — and cinema — forever. When Toy Story arrived in 1995, it wasn’t simply another animated family movie. It was the first fully computer-animated feature film, introducing audiences to Woody, Buzz Lightyear and a new kind of movie magic. Nearly three decades later, the questi...

Who are the greatest movie villains of all time? This week, Luke and Matt open the case file on five of their favourite cinema bad guys, from the quietly terrifying Noah Cross in Chinatown to Andy Serkis’s unforgettable Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In Five Favourites Vol. 1: Cinema Bad Guys, we celebrate some of the most memorable, disturbing and downright entertaining villains in movi...

Party on! Cinema Sleuths investigates Wayne’s World (1992), the comedy classic that went from a Saturday Night Live sketch to one of the defining movies of the early 1990s. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hurl! Few comedies have had the cultural impact of Wayne’s World . More than 30 years after Wayne and Garth first hit the big screen, the film’s catchphrases, music, characters and irreverent se...

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) turns 10 — but has time been kind to one of the most divisive superhero films of the modern era? A decade after its release, we reopen the case on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Was Zack Snyder’s ambitious Batman and Superman crossover always misunderstood, or was it really the stinker many people thought it was when it first hit cinemas? We investiga...

For our 100th investigation, we head deep into the jungle for John McTiernan’s Predator (1987) — the iconic genre-busting science-fiction action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers and Kevin Peter Hall. At first, Predator looks like the ultimate testosterone-fuelled 1980s action movie! In this episode, we investigate what makes Predator such an enduring classic. How did John McTier...

Space. The final frontier! 60 years ago, STAR TREK was released on the small screen. And nearly 50 years ago, STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE hit the BIG SCREEN! To celebrate TREK, this week, you Cinema Sleuths investigate Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), the ambitious science-fiction epic that brought the original Star Trek crew to cinemas for the first time. Starring William Shat...

The Rip (2026), starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and directed by Joe Carnahan, is a Netflix crime thriller that raises the question: has the era of prestige filmmaking left Netflix?

Lanterns is the latest DC property that has enraged the internet. Some fans seem to love it while others are infuriated. Do they have a good reason, or has fan discourse gone too far? We discuss that and whether this show is really worthy of the hate.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) is widely regarded as one of the classic film noirs — but does this celebrated adaptation of James M. Cain’s iconic hard-boiled novel still deserve its reputation? In this episode of Cinema Sleuths, we put The Postman Always Rings Twice to the test. We investigate Tay Garnett’s 1946 film and what made it a landmark of classic Hollywood and film noir.

Was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) the perfect adaptation of the original comics — or simply a very different movie hiding beneath the shadow of Turtle-Mania?

THWIP! The summer blockbuster has swung into town — and it’s a giant Spider-Man-sized case for Cinema Sleuths. Has Marvel finally moved on from Iron Man Jr and delivered a great Spider-Man movie again?  Does Spider-Man: Brand New Day capture what makes the character so special? And can this new chapter give Peter Parker the fresh start that the title promises? That’s what we want to know.

Have Daredevil and the Punisher finally brought the old Marvel television magic back — or has the MCU moved on without them?

Luke Deckard and Matthew Booth investigate Verhoeven’s 1987 classic, exploring its savage satire of corporate America, privatisation, consumer culture, sensationalist news and a society increasingly obsessed with violence and entertainment

In this episode of Cinema Sleuths, we investigate the strange era when two wildly different Sherlock Holmes franchises became mega-hits at almost exactly the same time.

The game is afoot! Between 2009-2012 Sherlock Holmes exploded on the big and small screens with the Robert Downey Jr / Jude Law film directed by Guy Ritchie as well as the hit BBC series SHERLOCK created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. This week, we're looking at the bonkers era in which these mega-hit franchises swept the world before suddenly dr...

What went wrong with the early summer blockbusters, from Disclosure Day to Supergirl?

This week, we discuss some of this summer's blockbuster hits and flops. We investigate Supergirl 2026 starring Milly Alcock, Toy Story 5, and Steven Spielberg's DISCLOSURE DAY.      Cinema Sleuths is produced by Luke Deckard & Matthew Booth  Edited by Luke Deckard  Theme song by Luke Deckard  Logo by  Phil Dragash    DISCLAIMER All content presented in this podcast episode is the property of t...

Did Robert Altman misunderstand Chandler’s iconic detective? Or did he create one of the most fascinating reinventions of the noir detective story? Luke Deckard and Matthew Booth investigate Altman’s The Long Goodbye, exploring Elliott Gould’s brilliantly unconventional Marlowe!

This week, we're back with a banger, and we're joined by crime fiction author and expert Maxim Jakubowski!   THE CASE: THE LONG GOODBYE 1973 Starring: Elliot Gould, Nina van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, and Mark Rydell Written by Leigh Brackett Based on the novel: THE LONG GOOBYE by Raymond Chandler  Directed by Robert Altman     CREDITS Find Maxim's book here: https://maximjakubowski.co.uk/ Mean St...

Burton’s Planet of the Apes remains one of the most fascinating blockbuster misfires of the early 2000s. But was the film really as bad as its reputation suggests? In this episode, we investigate the troubled road to Planet of the Apes, exploring the many attempts to revive the classic science-fiction franchise before Tim Burton finally took the reins.

This week, WE GO APE with CIMEMA MISFIRES as we look back at 25 years of Tim Burton's PLANET OF THE APES (2001), starring Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, Kris Kristofferson, Estella Warren, and Paul Giamatti. We map out the crazy road 20th Century Fox took to get there, the better sequel ideas that were ditched along the way, we discuss whether this film even...

In this special Battle of the Big Screen Hulks , Luke Deckard and Matthew Booth put Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003) head-to-head with Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk (2008)

HULKS SMASH!  This week your investigators are looking at HULK (2003) and The Incredible Hulk (2008) in BATTLE OF THE BIG SCREEN HULKS to see which of these two outings is the ultimate HULK movie... with special guest Neil Vagg, the creator of the popular entertainment website GET YOUR COMIC ON, this is one investigation to rage about!   HULK (2003) Dir Ang Lee Written by John Turman, Michael Fran...

Is Thief simply an early Michael Mann experiment, or the blueprint for the crime films that would define his career?