The Joys of Soviet Sherlock Holmes (and Dr. Watson)

Contemporary television feels like an endless tide of hot new thing after hotter, newer thing. I find the faux-urgency of it genuinely stressful. I love television, but I hate obligations, so I find myself retreating into the medium’s past, to shows which, pending an ill-advised reboot or two, don’t feel like they come with a deadline. And very little comes with less of a deadline than a Soviet adaptation of Sherlock Holmes from the 1970s and ‘80s.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson is usually called a series of TV movies, but I’m not sure why: each of the five “TV movies” aired separated into either two or three episodes, making them pretty normal TV seasons by European standards. Despite Vasily Livanov being given an MBE for his portrayal of Holmes, the show isn’t talked about or remembered much in the English-speaking world, at least outside of Holmes fanatics. It will appear and disappear onto YouTube every so often, and you can stream it if you pay to join Soviet Movies Online, a specialist streaming service for Soviet cinema. But it’s not going to show up on Netflix or generate a hundred articles announcing it on entertainment news websites if it did. But as it turns out, it’s one of the best TV shows there is.

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The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?: Love at Worst Sight Episode 3

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. Specifically, films considered among the worst of all time, for a new miniseries called Love at Worst Sight. It’s episode three, so Dean showed Ciara a legendary bit of trash: The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? They talk about some fun stories from its production, the naive artistry of its best parts and whether the main character is the worst boyfriend of all time.

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? The Sundae Presents

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The Sundae Film Awards 2023

In a lot of ways, 2022 wasn’t a “great year” for film, but that certainly wasn’t because it lacked great films. In fact, this was definitely the most competitive year we’ve ever had at the Sundae Film Awards and we genuinely considered tying most of the awards to reflect that. (We only tied one in the end.) We had a truly agonising experience picking our winners, and more than most years, you should check out our full slates of nominees at the bottom of the post, because there is nothing in there but great films.

The real reason 2022 won’t go down in film history is there was no one big story to tell about it. Instead, we had lots of little trends: semi-autobiographical films about the director’s youth (Aftersun, Armageddon Time, The Fabelmans), satires of the modern rich (Glass Onion, The Menu, Triangle of Sadness), movies that are mostly just people talking in one room (Three Thousands Years of Longing, The Whale, Women Talking) actors who appeared on Scrubs at the height of their movie stardom getting late career plaudits (Colin Farrell, Brendan Fraser). It was also a big year for poop, puke, piss, donkeys, stop-motion, and ominous concrete steps into dark. The last superstar actor and director on the planet each released a long-awaited blockbuster that helped to save theatrical distribution (Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water) and dormant auteurs returned with the best films of their careers (Elvis, Tár). Sony released the biggest superhero flop of the year twice because of memes and a canny campaign launched an indie actress to the front of the Best Actress race.

Most shockingly of all, the Academy… actually did a pretty good job of nominating worthwhile films for Oscars? Excitingly for us, that included correctly noticing that an Irish-language film was one of the best of the year for the first time ever. Irish cinema has been building towards a breakout on the global stage for a while now, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to see this moment finally arrive and celebrate it in our own annual film awards too.

As with every year, we gave one award for each of the eight major Oscars: we care about most of the others (except for the fake awards like Best Original Song) but this post would be absurdly long if we picked those too. We each did out our personal nominees and then selected the winner by consensus, so the winners only come from films that both of us have seen and nominated, but we’ve each picked a personal runner-up regardless of whether the other has seen or nominated it. We also each gave a Special Achievement Award for something that doesn’t fit our other categories: this year, by sheer coincidence, both to animated films.

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Ishtar: Love at Worst Sight Episode 2

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. Specifically, films considered among the worst of all time, for a new miniseries called Love at Worst Sight. In episode two, Ciara finally makes Dean watch Elaine May’s iconic comic flop Ishtar. They talk about its legendarily troubled production, how it became a punchline and why it deserves to be reclaimed.

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The Happening: Love at Worst Sight Episode 1

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. Specifically, films considered among the worst of all time, for a new miniseries called Love at Worst Sight. In the first episode, Dean puts Ciara through the ordeal of M. Night Shyamalan’s infamous flop The Happening. They talk about whether it’s funny, whether it’s meant to be funny, and how it could possibly have ended up like that.

The Happening The Sundae Presents

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Miami Vice: The Sundae Presents Bonus Episode 4

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. For the first time ever, they have a guest! Darren Mooney of The Escapist and The 250 joined the pod to show Ciara and Dean a film neither of them had seen: Michael Mann’s 2006 big-screen adaptation of Miami Vice. They talk about Colin Farrell’s accent, Jamie Foxx fleeing the set mid-production and why a Miami Vice film barely takes place in Miami.

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My Year of James Bond [Paste]

At the start of last year, I had seen one James Bond film: No Time to Die, in late 2021. Even though I loved it, I felt like I was missing out on so much context. James Bond felt like a huge black hole in my cinematic knowledge, too big to know where to begin stitching it together. Everyone I know, it seemed, grew up watching Bond movies—and has a particular actor they instinctively consider “their” Bond—leaving me without a model of how to get into Bond in the first place, at least without a time machine. At times, I used my preconceptions about Bond movies as a shield justifying my ignorance: Bond is misogynistic trash, anyway. British imperial propaganda. Cheesy and embarrassing besides.

Seeing No Time to Die with my dad, mostly because it happened to be on, I determined that I needed to get around to watching some James Bond films, misogyny and imperialism be damned. Then, because 2022 marked 60 years since the release of Dr. No, all the Eon-produced James Bond films were re-released in Ireland and the U.K., one each Wednesday.

I wrote about watching all the James Bond movies last year for Paste magazine. You can read it here!

Samurai vs Cowboy: Best of Seven: The Sundae Presents Episode 25

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. A year after Whedon v Snyder, it’s another “versus” episode: Dean brought Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Ciara brought its US remake The Magnificent Seven. They look at how each film examines the cultural figures of the samurai and cowboy, what changed in adaptation (and what didn’t), and how much craic they are.

Samurai vs Cowboy: Best of Seven The Sundae Presents

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Watchmen: The Sundae Presents Bonus Episode 3

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. It’s an emergency episode! (Though maybe not released on an emergency schedule.) Ciara watched Zack Snyder’s 2009 film adaptation of Watchmen, so she and Dean recorded an episode about it. They talk about the assassination of JFK, whether Rorschach is cool and the absence of a squid.

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2022 in Film(s That Didn’t Come Out in 2022)

Check out previous installments here.


2022 was a long, dreary year that overstayed its welcome many times over and we’re glad to see the back of it. But it had its highlights. Dean fell in love with James Whale and Claude Rains, fell back in love with superheroes and finally got 2001: A Space Odyssey after seeing it on the big screen. Ciara got Cruisepilled by Top Gun: Maverick, Bazpilled by Elvis and Brian Trenchard-Smithpilled by the films of Brian Trenchard-Smith. We saw My Chemical Romance live (!!!) and Dean accidentally bought two tickets to Michael Flatley’s Blackbird, which isn’t good, but is funny. Ciara watched all the Fast and Furious movies in February and Dean watched a bunch of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff films in October.

We released a load of really good episodes of our podcast, The Sundae Presents, and published excellent essays on Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road and Anglophilia, the death of the Queen and Herman’s Hermits by guest contributors Jennifer O’Callaghan and Will Shaw. We appeared individually on The 250 podcast to talk about It Happened One Night and Modern Times, and together to talk about The Conversation. Ciara got published a bunch of different places and Dean genuinely came up with around 200 original superhero and supervillains just for fun.

We’ll have our piece to say about the films released this year when we do the Sundae Film Awards in March, but suffice it to say, despite the bright spots, now more than ever, we’ve found our greatest joy in cinema past. Eras when the medium seemed full of potential instead of peril. This year, we’ve watched films famous and infamous, forgotten and forsaken, celebrated and slandered, from around the world and across time. Over a hundred for Dean, and over four hundred for Ciara. These are just some of our very favourites, and we highly recommend all of them.

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