Detective Conan: The Million-Dollar Pentagram review – cult anime goes on wild treasure hunt

The latest outing for the high school sleuth sees him join forces with his arch enemy, a master thief. Despite some flashes of brilliance, the script soon becomes convoluted

With its ingenious murder mysteries and thrilling solutions, Case Closed – also known as Detective Conan – has long been one of the most beloved manga series in Japan and abroad. In addition to an anime show running since 1996, a Detective Conan feature film has dropped almost every year. The highest grossing Japanese release of 2024 so far, this latest addition to the franchise also marks a milestone for animator Chika Nagaoka, the first woman to direct a Detective Conan movie.

For the uninitiated, the opening credits deftly recap the characters’ backgrounds in under two minutes. After a run-in with a secret crime syndicate, high school detective Shinichi Kudo is forced to take a mysterious pill, which shrinks his body to that of a seven-year-old. He takes up the name Conan – after Sherlock Holmes’s famous author of course – and continues to flex his analytical deductions while living with his crush Ran and her detective father Kogoro Mouri. Very few people know his real identity; two of them are Heiji Hattori, another teenage sleuth, and Kaitou Kid, a master jewel thief.