Whether its a nod to frontline Covid heroes or a return to biology in a world of digital noise, there’s a rich vein of new films featuring organ deliveries, including Runner and the latest Resident Evil

Hollywood loves a ticking clock – especially when there’s a delivery involved. For decades, dangerous cargo has been entrusted to certain types of action hero: spies, soldiers, hitmen, Jason Statham.

Lately, however, Hollywood seems interested in a different kind of hero – not to mention a different kind of cargo. Forget your nuclear launch codes, stolen diamonds and mysterious briefcases, for human organs are the new MacGuffins du jour, and the medical professionals charged with getting them to the ICU have become unlikely action heroes.

From Audrey Hepburn to Pedro Pascal, cellists have become a movie shorthand for sensitivity, intensity and emotional depth. But why has Hollywood turned one orchestral instrument into a character in its own right?

There’s a throwaway line in 2012’s The Avengers, after a character’s death, when his partner is alluded to. “There was a cellist, I think,” muses Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark. It’s a spot of pathos amid the punch-ups – but also rather telling. Because when even a superhero blockbuster reaches for the cello, you know the instrument is carrying more than just a melody.

Earlier this month, a trailer dropped for the upcoming Pedro Pascal drama Behemoth!, in which he plays a celebrated cellist returning to Hollywood to score films. Real-life cellist and film composer Hildur Guðnadóttir says the instrument “is definitely having a moment right now. But it’s always been present.”

Rafe Spall will play Conan Doyle’s super sleuth in a huge new drama next year. While some fans fear ‘Sherlock fatigue’, others – including Stephen Moffat – insist he will always make great telly

In 1893, in The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter, Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes’s older brother, Mycroft. Meeting Dr Watson for the first time, Mycroft shakes his hand and sighs: “I hear of Sherlock everywhere since you became his chronicler.”

Spare a thought for the rest of us, Mycroft. More than a century later, Sherlock Holmes has achieved a level of near-ubiquity that would alarm even the great detective himself – spawning ever more elaborate spin-offs that stretch his life backwards, forwards and sideways.

Boozing, grumpy, brilliant TV private eyes never really went away, but now they’re sleuthing with renewed vigour. Why is the noir detective back with a vengeance – and is it a bad omen?

Lace up your gumshoes! Hard-boiled detectives are back on the scene, fedoras pulled low, cigarettes sparked up. Nicolas Cage is leading the charge in Prime Video’s Spider-Noir, a shadowy spin on Spider-Man that drops in May – available to stream in black-and-white for the diehards. It promises all the hard-edged hallmarks of a good film noir: fast-paced, slangy dialogue, femme fatales, and a heavy-drinking detective at its centre – albeit one with web shooters rather than a snub-nose revolver.

He’s not the only PI in the frame this year. Apple TV is adapting Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir series into a series starring Colin Firth, while a new NBC pilot promises Jake Johnson as a “cynical and heartbroken” sleuth. And Brad Bird’s animated noir, Ray Gunn, is finally hitting Netflix after almost 30 years in development.

It’s not about John Bishop, Anna Wintour or Bill Clinton, but … Screen stories about pop stars, actors, sporting heroes or politicians bend fact by steering close to the deeds, or misdeeds, of real celebrities. What’s behind their rise?

Any self-respecting cinemagoer will know the phrase by heart: “The characters and events portrayed in this film are fictitious.” It’s cinema’s ritual boilerplate disclaimer. “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental and unintentional.”

Lately, however, film-makers have been treating the fine print like a challenge. A clutch of recent releases has taken up a curious middle ground: not quite biography, not quite fiction, but something more slippery in between. Marty Supreme, for instance, spins 1950s table tennis wildcard Marty Reisman into Marty Mauser, borrowing Reisman’s forename and forehand while rewriting the rest. Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? mines the early career of standup comic John Bishop, only to rebrand him as New Yorker Alex Novak. And later this year The Prince, directed by Cameron Van Hoy and written by David Mamet, will refract aspects of Hunter Biden’s life through proxy Parker Scott.