You know you've made it big when you have your own famous meme: if I had £1 for every time I've seen the Henry Cavill meme where Jason Momoa is creeping up on him, I'd have enough money to cast Cavill in my own movies. But until that happens, Netflix is one of the best places to get your Henry Cavill fix. You could say that the Netflix Cavill collection is super, man.
That's the last pun, I promise.
Here's three movies starring Henry Cavill that I think are worth watching, and each one is available to stream right now on Netflix.
1. Enola Holmes
Cavill isn't the lead here – the hero of Enola Holmes is the brilliant Millie Bobby Brown, who you may already know from Stranger Things – but as Enola's brother Sherlock he has a lot of fun in this superb reimagining of the Baker Street legend, a feminist romp that should delight all ages. Based on the Young Adult novels of Nancy Springer, Enola Holmes is a story about an ordinary Victorian girl who loves mysteries, martial arts and blowing stuff up, and her ongoing attempts to outwit her brothers Sherlock and Mycroft are enormously entertaining. When you consider that Sherlock Holmes is the most filmed literary character of all time (if you include TV as well as film) the fact that Enola Holmes feels so fresh is all the more remarkable. The core mystery isn't very mysterious but you'll enjoy the journey.
2. Night Hunter
Not to be confused with the 1996 vampire killing movie of the same name – a movie so bad that the best anyone could say about it was that it was “better than Bloodfist 8” – Night Hunter was originally called Nomis and has a hilarious 14% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. According to Mark Kermode, it’s “Superman in a hood in a remake of the last scene from Silence of the Lambs, but not as good” – and if that doesn’t make you add this to your watch list immediately I really don’t think we can be friends. Night Hunter takes a really good cast – Ben Kingsley! Stanley Tucci! – and completely wastes their talents on a “titter-inducing” (The Times) screenplay that delivers a load of “twaddle” (The Guardian). This is so much my kind of film it’s unreal.
3. Man of Steel
You knew I was going to include this after the dreadful pun in the intro and, er, the enormous Superman picture at the top of the page. And it should be here, because it's great and I think it's really underrated: on Rotten Tomatoes it's got a rubbish 56% rating, which I think is deeply unfair. Cavill is perfectly cast as the heroic and too-nice-to-be-human Superman and he delivers a pitch-perfect performance, and while that's clearly in conflict with Zack Snyder's overly flashy direction the movie is much more ambitious and thoughtful than your typical superhero fare. It's closer in mood to the darker, grittier Batman movies of recent years than it is to Superman Returns, and while it's not fully realised – the last half hour or so sometimes feels like it's a different movie – it's an interesting oddity thanks to Cavill's superhuman presence.
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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).
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