Enola Holmes 3 review – Netflix mystery franchise is starting to lose steam

Millie Bobby Brown returns, along with the creative team behind Adolescence, for an often thoughtful yet ultimately lesser threequel Despite the ever-increasing size and dominance of Netflix, the streamer has continued to struggle with its most obvious aim. While viewers might flock there for smooth-brained dating shows, tawdry true crime, Harlan Coben thrillers and junky romcoms, the platform is yet to be known for creating original movie franchises, the bread and butter of most old-fashioned Hollywood studios, for better or worse. The problem Netflix often faces is that to turn a big-budget bet into a cultural event, it requires more than a low-stakes click at home and a brief weekend’s worth of chatter. Big numbers might have met wannabe franchise-starters Red Notice and The Grey Man but a lack of real long-term interest has meant that sequels haven’t followed, while its most expensive film ever, Chris Pratt vehicle The Electric State, sank with both audiences and critics. It’s why ...

The Wire review – locals deal with razor-sharp border fence in migrant study

Documentary sheds light on responses to a fence designed to keep migrants of the EU Schengen area, a dizzyingly complex issue

Endless newsreel and column inches have been devoted to Europe’s migrant crisis over the past decade, and we are no nearer to getting to grips with the problem. This documentary by Croatian director Tiha Gudac opens up a fresh perspective by focusing principally on the effects on destination or transit countries: namely a beautifully sylvan stretch of the Croat-Slovenian border demarcated by the Kupa River and, now, horrible lengths of coiled razor wire laid down by the EU to prevent migrants from breaching the Schengen area.

The border fence sullies farmland and forests, complicates river tourism and separates Croatian and Slovenian communities who have ties going back centuries. The Balkan region is one with particular sensitivity to artificial segregation, and the local people tentatively fight back: early on, we see Croats and Slovenians joining up for a cross-border fun run. For those with long memories, this grim palisade, and the inhumane rejection of non-Europeans it implies, chimes with wartime fascism. But not everyone sees it that way: one father, mother and daughter spend their family time crawling under the wire to scope out points on the frontier where interlopers might be hiding.

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