12 Sherlock Holmes Movies & TV Shows, Ranked

Millie Bobby Brown stars as Sherlock’s teen sister, on the hunt for her missing mother, in this Netflix film that spawned a 2022 sequel. “You’ll absolutely love it, unless you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan,” a reviewer writes on IMDb. “Then it quickly [loses] its charms. They basically change every character completely to fit the story, rendering them unrecognizable.”

Nicholas Rowe plays a teenage Sherlock investigating a series of deadly delusions in this, the first full-length movie to feature a completely computer-generated character. “Sherlock Holmes hasn’t got a whip to crack, and a deerstalker replaces the fedora, but underneath all of the film’s Conan Doyle trappings, this is essentially another in a long line of Indiana Jones-inspired movies,” a viewer says.

In this picture, Ian McKellen takes on the role of the legendary detective, now retired, as he contends with dementia while trying to recall his final case. “A nicely understated film, which has all the twists of a Holmes story that you might expect, wrapped up in a warm-hearted, kitchen-sink drama about an aged detective and the relationship between him, his housekeeper, and her son,”

A rodent version of the detective investigates a toymaker’s kidnapping — and crosses paths with the human Sherlock, voiced posthumously by famed Holmes portrayer Basil Rathbone — in this animated flick. “By no means does it rank among the greatest Disney films [but] it’s lightweight, well-crafted fun, like all the best Saturday morning cartoons, with inventive set pieces and terrific voice acting,” an IMDb user says.

The aforementioned Rathbone got his start playing Holmes in this adaptation, the first of a 14-film series that cast Nigel Bruce as Dr. John Watson. “Although the film suffers slightly from its familiarity — it’s the most-filmed Holmes novel, after all — I found it delightfully paced and surprisingly modern in feel, far from the slightly fusty feel you’d expect from a film of the age,” one fan observes.

Before his role as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars, Peter Cushing portrayed Holmes in the second season of this BBC production, taking over the role from Season 1 star Douglas Wilmer. “A careful and occasionally engaging series, but despite stellar casts, the acting was at times variable, and the direction often tended to be stagy in a stodgy theatrical way typical of BBC programs at that time,” a reviewer says.

After giving voice to Holmes in a 1948 radio play, Howard Marion-Crawford shifted to the role of Watson in this American syndicated series, while Ronald Howard played the consulting detective. “The level of repartee between the two is excellent and, although the writing and acting could be a little wooden at times, the short duration of episodes means the story moves along at a good pace,” one IMDb review reads.

Guy Ritchie directed Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law in this big-budget action film, which follows Holmes and Watson as they thwart an adversary with dastardly geopolitical ambitions. “Downey Jr. and Law… take top honors as the year’s best bro-mance, arguing like an old married couple while deep down knowing that they’d be lost without each other,” one viewer says. (A sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, came out in 2011.)

CBS’ long-running, modern-day adaptation starred Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes, a former Scotland Yard consultant now working for the NYPD, and Lucy Liu as Joan Watson, Holmes’ sober companion-turned-colleague. “All the people involved have obviously worked very hard to create this intelligent and entertaining show, which has fun with the original stories and characters while still showing respect (in my view) to the books,” a fan says on IMDb.

Between 1979 and 1986, Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin played Holmes and Watson in five multi-part Soviet television films, starting with this screen transfer of Conan Doyle’s short story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” and novel A Study in Scarlet. “Their performances are magnetic viewing and full of subtlety,” one user declares. “Every scene between them is memorable.”

For a decade of British television, Jeremy Brett and David Burke played the crime-solving duo and acted out dozens of Conan Doyle stories across four ITV miniseries, starting with this one. “We have a glorious incarnation of Holmes and Watson here,” one fan raves. “Brett’s Holmes — cantankerous, affected, whimsical, rude, arrogant, precipitous, charming — can only have been drawn from the deepest possible understanding of the text.”

Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman both won Emmys for their portrayals of Holmes and Watson in this modern-day take that became the BBC’s most-watched drama more than a decade and still has devotees hankering for another season. “This show presents some pure brilliance in its delivery of my favourite fictional detective,” one such fan writes on IMDb. “Sir Arthur would, I believe, approve of this adaptation and be pleased that yet another generation is able to live the thrill of the chase…”