We recently heard that the entire Bond series is headed to Amazon Prime (at least in some territories), which is a great excuse to finally dust off an exercise that had been nagging at me since No Time to Die: re-ranking the series.

For Bond fans ranking the Bond films is a perennial parlour game, enhanced by the sheer number of films, the length of time covered (meaning the series has multiple distinct eras) and the variation in style and sensibility encompassed across the series (and often within films). For fans the ins-and-outs of that exercise are entertainment in themselves.

For more casual filmgoers wanting to revisit the series, however, there is a more basic consumer advice aspect to such a ranking. The series has wild swings in quality control, and a fair number of the films are actually not very good, especially for non-fans who don’t necessarily bring accumulated goodwill to the series. Many viewers I suspect also wander back into the lesser film with only childhood memories of the series; the risk of this is that they find that one of the lesser Moore or Connery entries has not aged well and consign the entire series to the dustbin.

That would be unfortunate. The series in the 1960s was ahead of its time, and several of the entries from this period are landmark works of action-adventure cinema. And while the franchise has never recaptured that level of cultural relevance, there are very good to excellent films dotted throughout its run.

Of course, notions of quality will vary wildly depending on what you want from a Bond film. Sean Connery 60s cool? Roger Moore 70s escapism? Or the more character-driven Daniel Craig films? So any ranking is wildly subjective, and subject to a big disclaimer that what any given person wants from a Bond film will vary. My own particular preferences for the series will become clear fairly quickly, but I like to think I am open to the qualities of every era and flavour of Bond film. (I really do want to like Roger Moore’s films more than I actually do!)

So with that disclaimer out of the way, here’s my ranking of the films.

Part 1: Sorry, But These Are Not Good Movies

I have divided this list into several tiers: the not-actually-very good films; the mid-tier mixed-bag outings; and the top-tier very good to excellent entries. This should be understood as a pretty loose grouping to give some structure – the line between top film of one tier and bottom film of the next, for example, is pretty arbitrary.

But let’s start with the films that I don’t think are good movies. My key defining element for this tier is that, while all have things to appeal to Bond fans, none of them are films I could really recommend with any conviction to the average non-invested moviegoer.

26 – Diamonds Are Forever (Guy Hamilton, 1971)

It will become obvious as I go on that the Roger Moore version of Bond is not my favourite. But every criticism you could make of the worst of those films applies doubly to Diamonds Are Forever, Sean Connery’s last in the official Bond series. It represented a drastic over-correction from the serious tone and tragic conclusion of the preceding film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. With Connery returning as Bond, the producers eschewed any direct continuity with that film and aimed for a light-hearted romp (in fact, the film walks right up to the very edge of being an outright comedy). But everything feels done on the cheap, with ugly cinematography; mundane locations and production design; unexciting action; and generally slipshod filmmaking. (There is even a moment where the same line of dialogue is looped in twice.) The sight of Bond in formal evening dress wandering around sleazy low-end Vegas casinos is the perfect visual metaphor for where the series had found itself.    

Connery doesn’t look as bored and unhappy as he did in his previous effort (You Only Live Twice), but instead smirks his way through in a manner that foreshadows lazier approaches to the character that would follow in the worst moments of the Roger Moore era. He’s placed alongside Jill St John’s inconsistently written Tiffany Case (feisty and capable one minute; ditzy the next) and Lana Wood’s wasted, callously dispatched Plenty O’Toole. The villains are ineffective, too, with Charles Gray inexplicably playing Blofeld as a campy fusspot with no link at all to the characters we’d seen in the 60s films (who were already, admittedly, inconsistently portrayed).

The film has a couple of good lines, though even then, it just as often tips over into smuttiness. And don’t get me started on its moon buggy chase, which is both nonsensical and (much more serious) not at all exciting.

This is the series’ most decisively bad movie.

25 – Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori, 2004)

I shuffled this around as I wrote this, tempted to slide it up a bit in recognition of stretches that are lively and entertaining. But its flaws are so egregious that whenever I put it above another film, it seemed unfair. This isn’t as relentlessly mediocre as Diamonds Are Forever, but I also think it hits the lowest lows in the series. While I generally feel the Pierce Brosnan era was defined by middling entries in the series, in his last entry it feels like quality control fell away completely.

After a pretty decent start in which Bond is captured and his loyalty questioned (a plot point that nods to Fleming’s The Man With the Golden Gun), Die Another Day comprehensively self-destructs about a third of the way in. No idea was too dumb: this is the film in which Bond not only drives an invisible car, he at one point hides behind it. Shortly after that, the villain tries to drown a character by melting an ice hotel with a space laser.

It’s that kind of film.

There’s also some infamously bad CG (updating the series’ traditional reliance on poor model work) in the scene where Bond kite-surfs on a wave. The series had long patches in the 1970s through to the 1990s where it failed to keep up with the standards of contemporary action films, but even against that background the kite-surfing scene is probably the series’ single most embarrassing from a production quality standpoint. 

24 – A View to a Kill (John Glen, 1985)

Roger Moore’s last film is a lacklustre reworking of Goldfinger, and the superficial reading would just be that the production team were running out of steam after more than two decades and five films with Moore. It’s not quite as simple, as that, though, since the films immediately before and after this are much better. For whatever reason, though, A View to a Kill certainly feels tired.

It may be that the filmmakers were starting to feel constrained by Roger Moore. I like Moore in the role and can recognise his charm – and from all accounts he was a delightful person in real life (see, for example, this very charming story). But he had arguably been too old for the role as far back as 1979’s Moonraker, and his in-universe appeal to much younger women, and the switching in and out of stunt doubles, is completely untenable here.

There is some nice business with Patrick Macnee as an ally of Bond, and Christopher Walken and Grace Jones bring eccentric energy as the villains, but otherwise this is all very lethargic. The action, in particular, is either too comedic (as in a firetruck chase where Bond inexplicably climbs out of the driving seat to dangle off the ladder in some “funny” business) or poorly staged (the climax atop the Golden Gate Bridge, which should be impressive but is ruined by shoddy back projection and weak choreography). It also has no control of tone: while the film is mostly light-hearted fantasy, it mixes in some of the nastier violence of the series to this point, in a protracted sequence in which Walken’s villain massacres workers in his base.

23 – Moonraker (Lewis Gilbert, 1979) 

Lewis Gilbert directed three very similar Bond films – You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker – which epitomise a certain idea of what the series should be. These are the lighthearted, fantastic, gadget-heavy romps, building to grand battles with maniacal villains in impossibly elaborate secret hideouts. This isn’t my favourite type of Bond film, but I respect that Gilbert’s films at least went all-in on this model, rather than half-baking it as many of the lesser Bond movies did. 

That said, Moonraker shows that formula at its weakest. It very closely replicates its predecessor, The Spy Who Loved Me, but has all of that film’s faults with little of its redeeming panache. The fantastic elements are pushed to the extreme – hover gondolas! Bond in space! – as is the tendency towards feeble, childish jokes. The plotting – as with most of the 70s Bonds – is very basic “now go here” stuff, and this was the first film where Moore looked too old for the role.

The film does have a great villain with some good lines, and the opening pre-title sequence is one of the best action / stunt sequences of the 70s, let alone of the Bond series. After that, however, there is scarcely an exciting scene.

22 – The Man with the Golden Gun (Guy Hamilton, 1974)

Roger Moore’s second Bond film sees the series in transition – not trying for the darker tone of the early Connery films (or even the preceding Moore film Live and Let Die), but also not attempting the extravagance of the Gilbert films that would round out the 70s. This is the third Bond film written or co-written by Tom Mankiewicz, and my impression is he always considered the films to be not much more than spoofs and wrote them accordingly. Similarly, Guy Hamilton had, a decade before, reshaped the series with the light touch he brought to Goldfinger, but here shows not much interest in building tension or excitement – the film’s one really good stunt, an amazing vehicle barrel roll, is undercut by being played for laughs.

This really leaves the film falling between stools, too silly to be taken seriously as any kind of serious spy thriller or action film, but without any obvious attraction either, beyond accrued goodwill for the franchise. Christopher Lee is always a welcome presence as the villain, and there is some nice production design (most notably in the MI6 base in a partially-sunken ship), but otherwise this does not have much going for it. On the other hand, there are plenty of problems, including some awful attempts at humour (especially through the Bangkok sequences, which unwisely bring back sheriff J.W. Pepper from Live and Let Die) and a clumsy attempt to cash in on the breakout popularity of Bruce Lee with an incongruous sequence at a martial arts academy.

As an aside, Lulu’s title song deserves a quick shout-out as one of the series’ first serious ventures into so-bad-it’s-good territory, particularly with regards to the lyrics (“Love is required / whenever he’s hired… Who will he bang?”). It’s sort of awesome, while also not being something you could imagine being in a better movie.

21 – Licence to Kill (John Glen, 1989)

I’ve already noted that I am not a fan of the Roger-Moore era “fantasy Bond” of films such as Moonraker. But that doesn’t mean that I think Bond films should be super serious either –  Fleming didn’t write straight-up John Le Carre-style thrillers. The tricky thing with Bond is walking the line between some larger-than-life elements and a real-life grounding. (It reminds me a lot of what has happened with fanboy craving for gritty and “realistic” Batman films – there may be some interesting territory there, and I like Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, but at some point you also have to recognise that these films are about a guy who dresses up as a bat to chase a clown.) 

Licence to Kill, the second Timothy Dalton Bond film, is an example of that balance out of whack. Dalton had been a breath of fresh air in his first film, The Living Daylights, and had helped bring the series back to earth. But here they lean right into that seriousness in the wrong way, coming up with a downbeat revenge plot that sees Bond battling a drug dealer. It won’t even commit properly to that, being afraid to kill the established character of Felix Leiter and instead fridging his new bride (although, judging by Leiter’s chipper tone at the film’s conclusion, he’s not too troubled). Despite some high quality stunts and action, the film also generally feels cheap, with flat TV-movie like cinematography and unglamorous locations. The result feels more like a pale imitation of 80s rogue cop movies than a Bond film.

20 – Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015)

Probably the most infuriating Bond film, and for my money the only really disappointing film of the Daniel Craig era. It is infuriating because at this point the film was in the hands of good craftspeople (led in this case by Sam Mendes, but extending across the whole production team), and because the producers had finally resolved legal hurdles that allowed them to bring back evil organisation SPECTRE and its leader Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Yet these plot points are completely wasted. Blofeld, in particular, is given a contrived link to Bond, which leads to a doubly deflating reveal of his backstory and name. The background reveal doesn’t work as Bond has known the crucial information since much earlier in the film, so the protagonist has already moved on by the time the audience is brought in to the picture; and the name reveal lands with a thud because the name “Blofeld” is only meaningful outside of the world of the film.

Mendes is the most distinguished director to work on the series to date and where his involvement elevated Skyfall, here there is an element of pretension, as if he felt the whole exercise was beneath him. In particular, for its middle third the film develops a languorous, almost dreamlike tone, where Bond and his ally and romantic interest Madeleine Swan travel through abandoned-feeling locations (a near-deserted hotel, what seems like a ghost train). Presumably the intent was to allow Bond and Swan to build a rapport that rivalled that between Bond and Vesper in Casino Royale, but it doesn’t work. At film’s conclusion we are asked to believe that Swan is the woman for Bond to settle down with, but it never feels convincing, despite the ample run-time devoted to building their relationship. At a plot level, too, the film falters on the aforementioned Blofeld nonsense, an espionage plot that seems one plot-twist short, and a tacked-on, anticlimactic conclusion.

I should also mention that Spectre is infamously ugly to look at: it opens in Mexico and uses textbook racist colour grading for that sequence, which then apparently nobody remembered to turn off. The whole film has a washed out, yellowy-brown palette that sucks all remaining fun out of what was already a dour adventure.

19 – Live and Let Die (Guy Hamilton, 1973)

I have criticised Guy Hamilton’s The Man with the Golden Gun above for its lack of ambition, but I have to acknowledge that his earlier effort Live and Let Die (the first Roger Moore Bond film) tries some interesting things. The film was made at a moment where there was a real question as to whether the Bond series had run its race – a distinctively early 60s phenomenon out of place in the early 70s, and lacking the star on which the character was built.

Against that background, Live and Let Die tries to pivot off the presence of a new actor and reimagine Bond. While the setting and plot have strong overtones of the series’ first film, Dr No, Roger Moore gives us a Bond who doesn’t drink martinis, doesn’t wear a tuxedo, and smokes cigars. It also weaves in a strong supernatural element, as well as borrowing from the iconography of 70s blaxploitation films (one of the series’ more judicious examples of fad-hopping). Paul and Linda McCartney’s banger of a title song is similarly deliberately out of the mould of previous Bond songs. 

Unfortunately, this doesn’t actually make what results very entertaining. Hamilton’s direction of action in particular is uninspired – his stewardship of the series represented the point where the Bond films fell below the prevailing standard of action filmmaking. Indeed, Live and Let Die feels more like a solid B-movie, really only separated from many low budget thrillers of the era by the scale of the boat chase sequence, and the whole production has a grubby and dour feel about it. The comedy relief of redneck sheriff J.W. Pepper was painful to watch even as a kid; as an adult in 2021, with the racial overtones his role brings, it is just about unwatchable. A similar bum note is struck with the treatment of Jane Seymour’s Solitaire. Bond tricking her into sleeping with him is one of the shadiest character moments in the series, and certainly the worst after the 60s. (Connery’s Bond does some really despicable stuff.)

So while I respect Live and Let Die’s ambition to try a few new things, I just don’t feel it holds together, especially for a modern audience.

18 – Goldeneye (Martin Campbell, 1995)

I suspect placing Goldeneye so low on this list will be seen as a misstep by many Bond fans, who tend to hold this in high regard. The film broke a long gap between films after Dalton left the role, and it deserves credit for resuscitating the franchise, establishing Pierce Brosnan in the role, and for the crucial addition of Judi Dench’s M (instantly a series MVP). But I think it’s telling that a film that doubtless updated the series as compared to its predecessor (1989’s Licence to Kill) still feels about a decade behind its contemporaries. Looking at this alongside competition like True Lies (from the year before) or Mission: Impossible (the year after) it feels like a relic from a different era.

Compared to those films Goldeneye’s action sequences, in particular, are sorely lacking – in fact, outside of the impressive central tank chase, it barely has a real action sequence. As an example, take the moment where the villains steal a helicopter – what would be a major setpiece in another franchise peaks at Bond running up a gangway. The opening pre-title sequence starts with a great stunt, but is completely undercut by hacky back-projection and clunky editing at its climax, swinging the sequence from fist-pump to facepalm in a few short moments.

Brosnan is fine as Bond, but even then fine is the word – he is the Bond who can do a little bit of everything without ever quite committing to one single strong take on the character. If you had a James Bond-generating computer that had a series of dials for character attributes on a scale of 1 to 10, Brosnan is what would pop out if you set every dial to 5. (This sounds really harsh but I don’t really mean it is an insult – he’s just an all-rounder. And to the extent it is a backhander, it reflects more the mediocrity of the films he got to star in, rather than his work). 

The idea of a rogue Double-O agent is solid, but even then, the way it is set up in the pre-credits sequence makes no sense at all. And while I know Famke Janssen’s Xenia Onatopp is a fan favourite, for me she pales in comparison to Barbera Carrera’s better take on a similar character in Never Say Never Again. Her name, too, is uncomfortably close to Austin Powers territory (think “Alotta Fagina”), and reflects the generally infantile level of the double entendres and dialogue here.

Overall, I just don’t get the love for this one.

Part 2: The Mixed Bags

More than most series, Bond films tend to be mixed bags – a product both of their typical “beads on a string” setpiece-oriented structure, and the producers’ longstanding willingness to mix disparate elements and tones in one film with little regard for overall cohesion or tone. This means that there are a lot of films in the series where their quality really depends on whether you focus on the good or bad. 

17 – The World is Not Enough (Michael Apted, 1999)

The World is Not Enough epitomises the mixed-bag Bond film. It has the strongest foundations of any of Pierce Brosnan’s films, with several plot points and ideas that should have made it the most interesting in the series between the 1960s and the Daniel Craig era. (Interestingly, several of those would be dusted off and reused more effectively thirteen years later for Skyfall). But watching it, the actual effect is dissipated by endless missteps, particularly surrounding the casting of, and dialogue for, Bond girl Christmas Jones. I don’t mind a sexy scientist, and I don’t mind Denise Richards per se, but she seems to have wandered in from a seperate reality to that occupied by much of the rest of the film.

The action sequences, too, fall victim to the producers’ preoccupation with gimmickry, which means that scenes are pointlessly tricked up (I assume to avoid perceived repetition). So instead of the Bond staple of a ski chase, we get a ski chase involving motorised paragliders; and another scene needlessly involves buzzsaws hanging from helicopters. These contrivances try to manufacture novelty when what would really distinguish the action was more attention to basic filmmaking craft – indeed, in both cases, the methods being used by the villains are so clumsy that they actually slow down the sequences.

Perhaps its those hints of Skyfall peaking out, but The World is Not Enough seems to me the Brosnan-era film that is most impatient with what the series was settling for in the 1990s. Ultimately, though, it can’t realise its apparent ambition to be better, and that reinvention would have to wait for the Craig era.

16 – Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965)

Released after Goldfinger had kicked the Bond craze into high gear, Thunderball has all the elements to be a classic Bond – and it is arguably second only to You Only Live Twice as the source of 60s Bond iconography. (The plot, in particular, is the staple Austin Powers ransom-the-world formula). The first widescreen Bond, it represents a considerable escalation in scale and ambition for the series. It is also even more self-aware than Goldfinger, most evidently in female assassin Fiona Volpe’s ridicule of the idea that she would fall for Bond – an explicit mockery of Goldfinger’s plot. (Volpe, played by Luciana Paluzzi, is the best thing in the film).

But the series seems to have grown beyond Terence Young’s directorial style – he excelled with the low-key Dr No and From Russia with Love, but he struggles to make the action sequences work here. The climax aboard the Disco Volante is a muddle of clumsy studio shots and back projection, while the battle leading up to it is (like much of the film) slowed down by seemingly endless underwater sequences. Thunderball is fun to revisit as a snapshot of 60s style and the Bond series at the height of its cultural relevance, and as the film equivalent of a holiday in the Bahamas. Ultimately, though, Goldfinger holds up better as the paradigmatic 60s Bond film; and if you are after the most excessive and grandest Bond film of the era, you’d be better turning to You Only Live Twice. 

15 – Octopussy (John Glen, 1983)

Even more than most of these mixed-bag Bond films, Octopussy is a real Whitman’s sampler of the best and worst of the Bond series. It is full of the kind of cringe-inducing jokey moments that epitomise late-period Roger Moore – the worst moments of Octopussy are just as bad as the more famously bad A View to a Kill. (It also adds a hefty dose of offhand racism to that film’s sins.) It also has the series’ most needlessly convoluted plot, with repeated double-crosses, a midpoint shift in focus, and multiple redundant climaxes.

At the same time, though, it is overflowing with good stuff. The pre-title sequence and a train sequence late in the film are both good action setpieces (especially by the standards of the series in the 1980s); a final aerial sequence, while completely unnecessary, includes some really impressive stunt work. The film also has stretches where it makes a pretty good fist of being a largely straight cold war thriller, building to an almost Hitchcockian sequence in which Bond is dressed in clown makeup, trying to defuse a bomb while nobody around will take him seriously. And both Louis Jourdan and Steven Berkhoff are fun as villains – although the wildly different register at which their performances are pitched (Jourdan all suave understatement, Berkhoff dialed-to-11 mania) adds to the general clashing of styles.

In their book Bond Films, Jim Smith and Stephen Lavington note these wild swings of tone and dismiss the film as a “plotless, witless, irredeemable mess.” If you are seeking any sort of overarching sensibility, theme, or cohesion you are likely to agree. But if you have been conditioned to the crazy juxtapositions in 70s and 80s Bond films you might be more forgiving. For me, Octopussy is a complete mess, but it is at least an entertaining mess for much of its length, and taken in isolation many of its individual scenes look quite a lot like a proper good movie. 

14 – The Spy Who Loved Me (Lewis Gilbert, 1977)

After fumbling through the first half of the 70s with the low-rent Diamonds are Forever, Live and Let Die, and The Man with the Golden Gun, this was the film that essentially relaunched Bond as a blockbuster franchise. It goes back to the bigger-is-better extravaganza model of Gilbert’s You Only Live Twice from a decade before, and is what we now think of as the archetypal 70s Bond film (even though Moonraker was the only other 70s entry that followed this formula).

As will already be obvious, this isn’t my preferred flavour of Bond movie. However I do genuinely understand the appeal of these campier entries, and really want to like this more than I do; there would be a place in my top ten and for a truly well-executed Roger Moore extravaganza. For most Bond fans The Spy Who Loved Me is exactly that, which is why it is generally held in higher regard than I have placed it. Unfortunately though, I just can’t fully share the widespread enthusiasm for this one.

For starters, I think the actual filmmaking still leaves a lot to be desired here. There is spectacular set design but some truly appalling model work – yes, even by 1977 standards – and it has the same feeble kids-movie-level plotting I complained about with Moonraker. (This is a feature of the Bond films written or co-written by either Tom Mankiewicz or Christopher Wood – although it is hard to know if it was they or the producers who were primarily responsible). The villain is disappointing – this is the one point where Moonraker is clearly superior – and Barbara Bach’s otherwise capable Russian agent is reduced to a spectator at the end of the movie. Throughout, the film’s sense of humour is campy and infantile.

Nevertheless, I can see what people like about this. If you are after grand set design, the villain’s base inside supertanker is spectacular; if you like gadget cars, Bond’s Lotus Esprit is the most iconic in the series since his Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger; and if you like Roger Moore’s take on Bond, well, this is Moore at his Moore-iest. A night-time sequence at the pyramids is one of the most menacing and distinctive in the 70s films (Gilbert’s directorial style is mostly pretty anonymous, but he is prone to the odd visual flourish and this sequence is the most effective example). And, most memorably, the ski jump that finishes the opening pre-title sequence is one of the most iconic and impressive stunts ever filmed.

13 – You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert, 1967)

You Only Live Twice is so close to the same film as The Spy Who Loved Me that is tough to separate them – it is a toss-the-coin decision as to which is the best example of the Bond film as over-the-top extravaganza. The difference will come largely down to whether you want your fantasy with a 1960s or 1970s flavour. In his first film in the series director Lewis Gilbert, along with screenwriter Roald Dahl and no doubt egged on by the producers, took the more fantastic elements introduced in Goldfinger, and not quite harnessed properly in Thunderball, and played up those aspects. Dahl was an inspired choice – his writing for adults, in particular, shares many traits with Fleming’s – but he was at heart a fantasist. This is the first Bond film where spectacle is firmly at the forefront, unrestrained by any lingering sense of these as even halfway-serious spy thrillers. 

It perhaps seems silly to complain about such elements – there were absurd aspects to the series right from the start and they definitely are a part of the Bond formula. But a lot of the crazy ideas thrown in here seem like more they were more fun to dream up than actually watch. At one point a car is picked up by a magnet during a car chase and dropped in the ocean, but it isn’t really the fun flourish that description makes it sound like; similarly, a grand helicopter battle is held back by the limits of what filmmakers at the time could achieve. The general sense that this is all a bit duller than it should be isn’t helped by a lethargic performance by Sean Connery, who at this point was burned out on the character. (I much prefer Connery to Moore, but to his credit Moore never phoned it in the way Connery does here). And the film is almost derailed halfway through when, first, the film’s main love interest is killed off and replaced with another woman we never get to know; and secondly, through a bizarre subplot in which Connery disguises himself as a Japanese fisherman. (This could have been a lot worse – mercifully, his disguise is so half-hearted that the film mostly avoids the minefield that could have resulted had the yellow-face makeup gone further.)

Despite its flaws, it edges out The Spy Who Loved Me, for me, based on a couple of factors. First, the Japanese setting is really well utilised – while we get a lot of picturesque rural Japan in the second half, I particularly enjoy the early citybound scenes. It captures the country on its post-war ascent to industrial and economic powerhouse, and it’s great to get spend some time in 1967 Tokyo, a location I have not seen in many English-language films of the 1960s. (This stretch of the movie also benefits from the charismatic performance of Tetsurō Tamba as Bond ally Tiger Tanaka). And as the film moves into its climax, the fantastic elements are more impressive. Ken Adams’ set for Blofeld’s hollowed-out volcano is extraordinary, and lends a real grandeur to the climactic battle that other Bond “battling armies in a lair” climaxes mostly lack. And while Donald Pleasance’s Blofeld is outrageously over-the-top and has no real continuity with the character built up across previous films, there’s no denying that he’s an iconic villain. 

12 – Never Say Never Again (Irvin Kershner, 1983)

This is where many Bond fans – already on edge when they saw my numbering start at 26 – will dismiss me as either insane or deliberately contrarian. Sean Connery’s comeback film as Bond (for legal reasons a remake of Thunderball) was produced outside of the “official” Bond series… and most Bond fans hate it. And while it definitely has a lot of issues – especially in its very shaky final third – those fans seem to fixate on the same kind of silliness that they routinely excuse in the official films of the 1970s and 1980s.

Despite its odd choices and some points where budget and production issues show through, much of Never Say Never Again is livelier and more inventive than the typical Bond fare of this era. Director Irvin Kershner and his screenwriters (a credited Lorenzo Semple Jr, with an uncredited polish by comedy writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais) stage scenes with a wit not usually scene in the series in this era. Look, for example, at the early fight in the health club, which is alternately exciting and funny, and has several clever moments such as the patients’ cheers as they watch a fight on TV while Bond and his assailant fight behind them. Another tiny example is the moment where the diegetic (in-universe) music of a hotel band provides score for Barbera Carrera’s Fatima Blush as she ascends a staircase.

These are little things, of course, but under the stewardship of workmanlike directors such as Guy Hamilton and John Glen, the main series simply wasn’t usually this inventive in this era. And for every silly and dated moment (like the video game showdown between Bond and the villain) there’s plenty more that are smart and effective (like Bond’s improvisation of a pretend “motion-detecting” bomb to occupy a security guard; the clever angle taken on the usual Q briefing; or the neat switcheroo when Blush tries to blow up Bond’s hotel room).

The other key thing the film has going for it is the cast. Where the official Bond films avoided the use of name actors (at least until the 1990s), this features a depth of established or upcoming talent through the supporting cast: Kim Basinger, Max von Sydow, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Edward Fox, and even Rowan Atkinson in a small comic part. (Dismiss the latter if you like, but the same year’s official film Octopussy inexplicably uses tennis player Vijay Armitraj as its comedy relief – Atkinson is at least a professional, and he is funny here). All are strong in the roles, but the movie is stolen by Barbara Carrera as Fatima Blush – her gleeful delight in her own evil-doing is perfectly judged. (Even as a defender of the film I’ll admit you can probably turn it off once Blush is dispensed with).

At the heart of it all is Sean Connery, providing the film equivalent of a band’s reunion concert. He isn’t the Bond of his early 60s performances, but he’s much more engaged than he was in his official films after Thunderball, and the film gives him lots of good lines to deliver. (His final confrontation with Blush is one of my favourite of all Connery’s scenes as Bond). This is a film built first and foremost on the pleasure of simply watching Connery do his stuff as Bond, which was and remains a legitimate foundation for the film. And the film actually manages to address Connery / Bond’s age much more effectively than the later Roger Moore films managed to do. 

I will, however, offer no excuse for Connery’s outfit below.

11 – For Your Eyes Only (John Glen, 1981)

For Your Eyes Only is a strange beast: the Roger Moore Bond film for people who don’t like Roger Moore Bond films. That self-conflicted (and, arguably, self-defeating) exercise goes to the heart of my mixed feelings about it.

After the excesses of Moonraker the Bond producers clearly wanted to go back to basics, and this is the closest Moore got to a straight-down-the-line espionage tale like From Russia With Love. Seen that way, what the film does do is capable enough – it’s an enjoyable spy adventure, with a fun car chase a third of the way in and impressive ski stunts in the second act. Carole Bouquet is one of the better Bond women of the era (albeit one with zero romantic chemistry with Moore – not at this point, a failing that could be fairly placed on Bouquet). And its only real moments of irredeemable Moore-era goofiness are confined to the pre-titles and the closing scenes, where they don’t detract excessively from the body of the film.

However this studious reduction leaves it a little bland. Its settings and some plot aspects give it the vibe of a Tracy-less On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (interestingly, no other film in the series references Tracy as explicitly as this film does in its pre-title sequence). Again, though, does anyone want such a thing? And what is the merit in doing an espionage thriller when the film’s major plot turn – I can’t dignify it with the term “twist” – is telegraphed from so far away?

For Your Eyes Only is solid throughout, and its avoidance of the flaws of so many other Bond films gives it this relatively high ranking. But outside of a Bond marathon it’s tough to think of any particular reason to watch it over any of the next ten films, or any number of superior action films of the era.

Part 3: The Top Ten

Neatly enough, as we turn into the top ten we shift to films where the good decisively outweighs the bad; the bottom half of this grouping are highly enjoyable Bond adventures, while the top half can stand unapologetically with the very best films in the action-adventure genre. 

10 – Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1997)

The only one of this top ten I’m a tiny bit shaky on – there are some valid criticisms to be made of this film’s plot and climax, which I’ll come to. But for me it is clearly the most successful of Brosnan’s films. It is more competently executed, especially with regards to its action scenes, than Goldeneye; and much clearer on its tone and intent than The World is Not Enough. Probably no other Bond film is as single-mindedly focussed on being an action film: it races out of the blocks with an entertaining and well-staged pre-credits sequence, and then carries on with that momentum with scarcely a pause.

That focus means that certain ambitions fall by the wayside – there are suggestions in dialogue, for example, that Teri Hatcher’s Paris Carver was a great lost love of Bond, but the film doesn’t have the time to make this feel true or give Carver any real weight. And I wouldn’t want every Bond film to be this basic – every film above this on this list has greater ambitions in terms of tone, theme, or story. In terms of the narrow ambitions of escapist fun that many have for a Bond film, however, it works for me better than any of the Roger Moore films. The action scenes are well-staged and (mostly) not too silly; the humour is effective and (mostly) not too puerile. The film is also given a lift by the very effective score by newcomer to the series David Arnold, who would go on to be one of the series’ most valued contributors through to the early Daniel Craig era.

I will admit that Tomorrow Never Dies falls across the finish line – the climax isn’t very exciting, and doesn’t make a great deal of sense. (The villain’s plan would seem to be foiled as soon as the British and Chinese are aware of what he is doing, which they are – or should be, it is fudged a little bit with some dialogue – at the end of the film’s second act). It also doesn’t help that not only is the audience let in on the details of the villain’s scheme from the very earliest stages of the movie, but at the climax the villain is essentially replicating his actions at the film’s start. And having recruited Michelle Yeoh as a co-star, she isn’t given enough to do – her one martial arts scene is pretty tepid.

Even with those issues, however, this is one of the more purely enjoyable Bond adventures, and certainly the best that the underutilised Brosnan was given.

9 – From Russia with Love (Terence Young, 1963)

The second Bond film is the closest the series ever got to a straightforward cold-war thriller, although in a departure from Fleming’s book the plot is contrived to substitute the private sector crime syndicate SPECTRE as villains, rather than the Russians. Sean Connery is still in a sweet spot, performance-wise, weaving just a little more humour into his suave portrayal of Bond; similarly the filmmakers are able to add a few more components of the Bond formula. Desmond Llewellyn, for example, makes his first appearance as Q, providing Bond his first true gadget in a tricked-out briefcase. The film also sees John Barry – who had provided arrangements for Dr No and whose contribution to the composition of the Bond theme is a contested issue – promoted to the main composer. And a piece of editorial improvisation by Peter Hunt moved one sequence before the titles, initiating one of the series’ key traditions. 

The higher budget compared to Dr No allows for some evocative use of locations in Turkey, and increased scope and excitement to the action sequences. The fight on a train between Bond and Robert Shaw’s Red Grant is a particular highlight, with director Terence Young, editor Peter Hunt, and stunt arranger Bob Simmons creating an intense sequence that feels at least a decade ahead of its time.

For many, all these qualities place From Russia with Love at the series’ absolute pinnacle. For me it’s a shade below that level, feeling its age a little and lacking the punch of some of its successors. I can admire and respect it, but I can’t genuinely enjoy it the way I can the higher-placed films that follow.

8 – The Living Daylights (John Glen, 1987)

Coming after A View to a Kill and a decade-and-a-half of Roger Moore films, it’s hard to overstate how fresh Timothy Dalton’s first Bond film felt at the time. While Dalton had been on the radar of producers for some time, he ultimately was a last-minute replacement after Pierce Brosnan fell through (Brosnan, obviously, would get his chance eight years later). This meant that there was uncertainty about who was to be Bond through much of the pre-production, and The Living Daylights was written for a somewhat “default” version of Bond, neither too jokey nor to serious.  With the example of Licence to Kill to look back on, its clearer that this works to Dalton’s advantage. In his second film his dour take on Bond feels a drag. Here, though, the film’s tone and humour sits perfectly in balance with Dalton’s approach – he is just serious enough to anchor the film without dragging it out of the escapist realm. 

Despite being made by much the same team as A View to a Kill, this feels thoroughly invigorated, kicking off with an exciting pre-title sequence at the Rock of Gibraltar that is, for me, director John Glen’s best work in the series. It then segues into a spy plot expanded effectively from an Ian Fleming short story. Octopussy had done something similar two films earlier – and the two films have a lot of similarities, including their multiple villains and complicated plots – but The Living Daylights moderates that film’s wild swings of tone and works better as a coherent package. Action highlights include the chase using the series’ most underrated gadget car, an Aston Martin Volante; and a fight between Bond and henchman Necros hanging from the back of a plane that continues a series of spectacular aerial stunts extending back to Moonraker.

While Licence to Kill would mark the last film of much of this production team, many of whom had been with the series since the 1960s, The Living Daylights for me represents the last great film of the “old” Bond series, before the series returned with largely new creative personnel in the 1990s. (And this was the last in the series scored by John Barry, who contributes a typically terrific score for his series swansong.) It has aged more gracefully than any other 1970s or 1980s entries, and looking back it seems like a clear prototype for the tone the series would aim for in the Daniel Craig era.

7 – Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012)

Skyfall saw the Bond series got its most highly-credentialled director in Sam Mendes, capping off a general upgrading of production quality that had occurred in the Daniel Craig era. After the revisionist takes of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, Mendes and the producers seem intent on rebuilding some of the series infrastructure – most notably by reintroducing (and smartly reimagining) Q and Moneypenny, but also some other mainstays (Bond’s Aston Martin gets re-gadgetised, for example). Yet they do so without sacrificing the best innovation of the preceding films – the increased emotional depth and sense of genuine jeopardy. Here that involves the departure of Judi Dench’s M, and a well-managed transition to Ralph Fiennes’ version of the character. That story is driven by one of the series’ most menacing villains in Javier Bardem’s Silva. 

The film also benefits by getting off on the right foot. Skyfall leaps out of the blocks with one of the series’ best pre-title sequences, involving a series of escalating action beats that build to an is-Bond-dead-fakeout straight out of the Connery era. That in turn is followed by Adele’s banger of a title song, one of the best handful in the series. As the film progresses, the influence of cinematographer Roger Deakins becomes increasingly obvious – this film brought a level of visual lushness that was new to the series. 

This is all so well done that the film might seem to warrant a spot in the top two or three in the series – certainly many others rate it that highly. Indeed, Skyfall‘s virtues are so strong that even after placing the film in my top ten of the series, I need to spend a disproportionate time on what doesn’t work so well to justify its place outside my top five (let alone its placement below the frequently-reviled Quantum of Solace).

The first half of the film is nearly flawless, save for the awkward plot idea that Bond, after two movies set during and immediately after his first mission, is a late-career agent. However Skyfall’s first serious wobble comes at almost exactly the halfway mark, in scenes bracketing the justly famous introduction of Silva, with the treatment of Bérénice Marlohe’s Severine. Severine is the kind of “sacrificial lamb” character that the series had been doing since Goldfinger – someone for Bond to sleep with, who is then killed to provide Bond some additional depth and motivation for the second half of the story. This trope was already well past its expiration date (and had also provided a bum note in the preceding Quantum of Solace) but Skyfall handles it especially badly. Not only does the film make explicit that Severine is a trafficked sex worker – raising awkward questions about her agency in sleeping with Bond that the film can’t begin to deal with – but the scene in which she is killed is especially callous. (Interestingly, the producers might have twigged that this kind of character no longer worked, since Monica Bellucci and Ana de Armas’ characters in Spectre and No Time to Die, respectively, seem conceived explicitly in opposition to this model).

The film is also conspicuously poorly plotted in its second half, with events in the film playing out in manner that is almost arbitrary, depending variously on omniscience on the part of Silva or randomness on the part of Bond. The latter impulse is shown by the film’s out-of-nowhere relocation to Scotland for a climax involving Bond and M teaming up with Scottish groundskeeper Kincaid (played by Albert Finney). While the producers have denied this, Kincaid was obviously an artefact of scripts drawn up when it was hoped that Sean Connery would take the role. Had Connery done so, his presence would have provided the necessary movie logic to justify the character’s existence. As it is, though, Kincaid is a character who assumes incredible prominence in the last act of the movie with no setup earlier in the film. It’s jarring.

Again, I should emphasise that I am having to describe these flaws in such details because Skyfall’s strengths are so manifest that its placement at only 7 on this list warrants comment. It is also the most vital film to any one sequence of Bond films, effectively acting as the supporting structure for the whole Craig era. It provides the transition from the Dench M to the Fiennes M; it adds a supporting cast that will be vital to the remainder of the Craig era; and it is the only true standalone Bond adventure Craig made, bracketed between a pair of two-film adventures.  

6 – Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster, 2008)

Probably the most underrated and dismissed Bond movie, Quantum of Solace is still reflexively dismissed as “the bad Daniel Craig movie” even several years after Spectre’s bold (and for me decisive) play for that title. And it does have flaws, most notably its famously overwrought editing that garbles some key moments and – more crucially I think – makes the film so narratively aggressive that it doesn’t invite enough reflection on what the movie is actually doing. But I love Quantum of Solace.

It is true that Quantum of Solace is doing things that I wouldn’t want all, or even many, Bond films to do. It is not just a sequel to Casino Royale – it’s essentially an extended coda, and it really only works if seen right after its predecessor (or at least with intimate familiarity). For example, the film’s whole meaning and impact turns on one line by Bond to M at the end – “Congratulations, you were right.” That isn’t a reference to anything M said in this film – it’s a call back to M’s comments about Vesper Lynd’s motivations at the end of Casino Royale. This reliance on its predecessor for not just plot points, but also its emotional underpinning, means in many ways it is not a true standalone film. Importantly, though, it isn’t relying on Casino Royale as a crutch and borrowing its emotional centre. Instead, it extends Bond’s story from that adventure in a manner that is thoughtful and interesting – albeit not, to the detriment of its reputation, as accessible as it could be.

Let’s start, though, with that editing. It is true that the film relies on a combination of shaky camera and choppy editing for many of its action sequences, in a manner that recalls the Paul Greengrass-directed Bourne sequels (which had been released in 2004 and 2007). It isn’t my favourite way to direct action, as I’ve written elsewhere. That said, I think it only really ruins two action moments: the very start of the opening car chase (when the cars are in the lakeside tunnel) and the opening of the shootout at the opera (which is so disorienting that I wonder if it was cut around a lack of coverage). The rest of the sequences are a little jumpy but well within the range of modern action cinema – they are not, for example, any less legible than the climax of Casino Royale. And some of the action is very effective: I particularly like Bond’s early fight on building scaffolding, where he must negotiate ropes, pulleys, and swinging platforms.

The other editing issue relates to narrative scenes. It is true that the film moves forward at a breakneck speed, and this means that the film doesn’t always give a breathing space to its narrative. This sometimes results in thematic or plot points not being as clear as they should be. On a first viewing, especially, this means that the film has to get by on adrenaline – but that works for me. The film is following a single-minded, headstrong Bond as he follows leads in an aggressive and impulsive manner, and the ceaseless narrative drive works in that context.

The early Haiti sequence is the best example of this forward rush, with Bond jumping from lead to lead in a series of impulsive decisions, each made in only a moment. (My favourite is when Camille pulls up and – mistaking him for someone else – orders him into her car. Bond’s small beat before agreeing, which lets us in on Bond’s thought process, is beautifully played by Craig.) Other films in the series show Bond improvising, but usually this is in the context of an action sequence (the clearest example being the opening of Skyfall as Bond goes from car to bike to train). Here his decision-making propels us through what in other films in the series would be clunkier “now go here” briefing exposition, and I love the momentum that the film has in these stretches. 

So I like the film’s energy and think it works well for the material given how driven Bond is throughout. Repeat viewings, however, add some layering to that initial approach. The film is often pigeon-holed as “Bond out for revenge,” along the lines of Licence to Kill, but it is smarter than that. Bond is out not for revenge but for answers, something that can give him a small amount of comfort (or *cough* a quantum of solace *cough*) regarding Vesper’s betrayal. As Andrew Ellard has pointed out in his very good video essay on the film, the revenge mission is actually what characters in the film mistake for Bond’s intent. The key scene in this regard is that in which M confronts Bond in the hotel room, because this is where she realises that Bond is actually (as she puts it) “on to something” and backs her agent in. It’s a crucial moment in building Bond and M’s relationship – which I felt was too antagonistic in Casino Royale – but also shifts this from being a simple “rogue Bond” scenario to one in which M is using Bond more strategically. And for Bond, his quest results not in revenge – which at film’s end he pointedly declines to extract – but in a small act of rehabilitation of his memories of Vesper and a redoubling of his commitment to his job. This is all judiciously contrasted with Camille’s story, which serves as thematic complement to Bond’s in a way earlier films’ use of similar characters (most notably Melina Havelock in For Your Eyes Only) did not.

I also think that the film’s freneticism makes the moments where it does slow down more effective. When the film pauses for reflection in its midsection (as Bond visits Mathis in Italy and then flies on to Bolivia), we get some of the most genuinely contemplative scenes in the franchise. While Craig and the film’s producers have been quite self-deprecating about the film, suggesting the writers’ strike meant they never polished the script to the their liking, I find these scenes completely on-point and affecting. Where most films in the series will present these nods to a darker, more thoughtful Bond as afterthoughts that are virtually at odds with the film around them, Quantum of Solace is insightful and consistent in its view of Bond’s psychology. 

Skyfall is the Craig film that wows its audience on first viewing with its obvious virtues, but has some nagging flaws that drag it down a little on re-viewing and further reflection; Quantum of Solace, by contrast, is the entry that has obvious problems on first watch but which rewards fresh viewings and closer thought. As I have said, I also wouldn’t want many other Bond films to follow this template, so understand those who reject it as not a proper Bond movie. But in a series of 25 films and counting, I like that it tries different things and find this a refreshing new flavour of Bond film.

5 – Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton, 1964)

Goldfinger is probably, in the popular consciousness, the definitive Bond movie. It was the film released just as the series pop-cultural relevance crested, and it is the film that decisively shifted the film towards more light-hearted fantasy after the relatively grounded Dr No and From Russia with Love. I have said in earlier entries in this list that I don’t really care for the sensibility of Guy Hamilton’s 70s films. But the lighter touch he brought to the series after Terence Young’s entries nudged the film into a sweet spot in terms of tone, and Goldfinger still stands as a reference point for the Bond series’ style.

For these reasons, the film has long been a traditional reflexive top entry on Bond film lists. It is a shade below the very top entries for me, not just because of the qualities I love in the films that follow, but also because of aspects of the plotting. The film manages to knock most of the rough edges off Fleming’s clumsily-plotted source novel, but can’t completely obscure Bond’s passivity in the latter portions of the film, where he is taken prisoner and only saves the day through his magical seductive powers (a plot turn so on-the-nose that it would be explicitly mocked by a character in the next film, Thunderball). It is also ironic that a film famed (mostly justly) for embodying 60s style and glamour spends so much time in mundane parts of the United States, including grubby highway-side shopping strips. (This is the Bond film where local colour is provided in the form of a trip to obscure local retailer Kentucky Fried Chicken.)

As much as those probably-not-quite-as-good-as-you-remember aspects of Goldfinger drag it down a little, the balance of the film is a parade of iconic moments. The opening, for example, perfects the pre-title sequence (which had been invented by accident in the editing process of From Russia with Love), sending Bond on a mini-adventure with no connection to the rest of the film. It’s a glorious start to the film, allowing for some truly ludicrous touches (in a matter of seconds we have Bond with a duck on his head, and tuxedo under his wetsuit) that know just how far the humorous elements can go without breaking the reality of the film.

Connery is perfectly in on the joke here. While my favourite Connery Bond performance is his hard-edged agent of Dr No, in terms of the classic escapist Bond this film is his finest moment – he exudes charisma and confidence without tipping over into smirking swagger, as both he and some of his successors would in later films. His mock bemusement in the pre-title sequence, for example, as he lights his cigarette synchronised with detonation of the explosives he has just planted, is as pitch-perfect a Bond moment as you will find in the series. (Frankly, it is Connery’s command of the screen that helps distract the audience from how unsuccessful Bond’s investigation is throughout the movie – he seems in charge even when almost everything he does is going wrong).

This is also the first film that really ran with the idea of Bond gadgets. While From Russia with Love had introduced Desmond Llewellyn as Q, here we have the archetypal Q sequence that at once defines Q’s character and also introduces the definitive Bond car, his DB5. While later entries were frequently both lazy and silly in their use of gadgets, Goldfinger is one of the clearest examples of the fun factor they can add to a film when judiciously applied. Again, it’s an example of the film getting the balance right.

Some of these aspects of what works in the film are easy to understand (even if they would prove tricky for the series to reliably reproduce). I think one of the central mysteries of Goldfinger, however, relates to the villain Auric Goldfinger himself, played by Gert Frobe. He shouldn’t be an effective villain – a schlubby middle-aged businessman with no notable affectation other than an interest in precious metals, and no really obvious sense in which he seems a formidable match for Bond. His most defining characteristic is a weaselly cunning (cheating at cards and golf, and betraying his own side to escape in the final battle) rather than anything that sets him up as a master villain. Somehow, though, Goldfinger is one of the series’ most memorable and effective villains, and the film’s golf sequence is the best of the series’ social battles (in which Bond and villain face off in games or sports in elite settings).

The film also finishes strongly, which helps smooth over my reservations about the film’s Kentucky sequences. Despite the quality of Ken Adam’s work on Dr No, the Fort Knox set is the first really stunning climactic set of the series, and makes a great setting for Bond’s final fight with henchman Oddjob. The sequence shows the filmmaker’s aptitude for different modes of action at this point in the series. In the preceding film, From Russia with Love, they had staged a fight on a train that is still startlingly visceral nearly six decades later. Here, Bond is so outmatched by Oddjob that he needs to think his way to victory, and the fight choreography is extremely effective at showing a slower and more methodical exchange of blows (largely played without score).

Goldfinger propelled the Bond series forward – as the most crucial formative Bond movie, it is also inherently one of the most significant films in the action-adventure genre. Where in From Russia with Love there was a sense that the producers were looking at their inspirations (such as Hitchcock’s thrillers) and trying to replicate them, in Goldfinger you can feel them moving beyond those predecessors and laying down the template for the modern action-adventure film.

4 – Dr No (Terence Young, 1962)

As the very first Bond film, I think Dr No tends to get either dutifully admired simply as the starting point for what follows; or dismissed as a not-yet-mature version of what the series (which, as I have just suggested, was really distilled two films later in Goldfinger) would become. Yet I genuinely love Dr No in its own right.

That is primarily down to Sean Connery. Despite Connery being almost unknown at the time, Dr No seems built to showcase its lead actor, and he rewards the filmmakers’ faith in him. Connery is great in several later films (From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, and yes, Never Say Never Again) but he would never play the role as straight as this again. Where later films relied on our understanding of the iconography of Bond as a shortcut – we know he’s cool and irresistible to women because we understand that is a rule of the universe – Connery had to build the idea of the super-cool gentleman agent from the ground up.  His introduction at the casino table is pure star power, a flexing of screen charisma that can sit alongside Orson Welles’ appearance in The Third Man as one of cinemas’ great entrances.

The films’ somewhat basic qualities only serve to highlight the qualities of that performance. Dr No is the film most interested in just watching how Bond goes about things. These early scenes are full of insightful detail. For example, where later films would show Bond making childish quips in M’s office, Dr No establishes a more interesting tension between Bond’s professional subservience to M and his independence as resists giving up his favoured gun. We see him think on his feet (deliberately and coolly entering  a trap by leaving with a chauffeur he knows to be fake) and engaging in convincing spy-craft (using hairs across doors to detect intruders in his room). And of course the film has one of the definitive ruthless Bond moments when he kills Anthony Dawson’s Professor Dent in cold blood. 

The film’s relatively basic structure is excellent at foregrounding this performance. But it is also one of the most structurally satisfying Bond films. I have mentioned that the Bond series frequently juxtaposes the grounded and fantastic, and the better Bond films are frequently those keep a tonal balance between these elements. Dr No, however makes the progression from reality to fantasy core to its structure. It starts as a grounded procedural, with an unfussy style as it reveals the details of Bond’s plausibly-presented secret service. Yet the closer Bond gets to the villain, the more fanciful elements start to creep in. While Connery’s performance remains grounded throughout, his journey is towards a villain working in a different kind of narrative register to the world we start in. The film thus establishes the breadth of the Bond universe by building it into its hero’s journey.

While the film has excellent production quality throughout given the limitations of its budget, particular note should be made of Ken Adam’s work on the sets. His most famous set for the film is doubtless the room in which Professor Dent receives orders, and a tarantula, from  the disembodied Dr No – it’s a classic bit of minimalist design. His sets for Dr No’s base later in the film, despite being done on what was a shoestring budget, establish much of the template for the later grandiose sets Adams and other production designers would provide for the series. Other key production credits include Peter Hunt’s sharp editing, the fantastic title design by Maurice Binder, and of course the memorable score (with John Barry providing the classic arrangement of Monty Norman’s theme).

It is perhaps understandable given the sheer sweep of the series that Dr No is remembered more as a precedent and a template. But if you try to look at it with fresh eyes, and see the extent to which it was building its own world without established tropes to draw on, its level of achievement becomes clearer. This is a classic of adventure cinema.

(Back in 2004 I wrote a much longer essay on my love and admiration for Dr No that you can read here).

Part 4: Equal First?

I was highly tempted as I formulated this list to declare these top three films equal first – and it would be fair, because base on mood I could call any of these my favourite. But that would be the coward’s way out – so I have taken a deep breath and assigned ratings to these last / top three.

One other note – any Bond fan will recognise these as the three films that make a big play to tell a story about the great love and / or loss of Bond’s life. (Only Skyfall and perhaps Spectre or – at a stretch – Licence to Kill make a serious attempt at a story development as consequential). My rating of these three will therefore perhaps make it seem like I hunger for the Bond films with pretensions beyond the normal format of the series.

I will explain more about what I like about each of these films below, but let me just say that I don’t think that is quite what is driving the placement of these films on this list. It is true to the extent that the greater narrative ambitions of each of these films does give them a certain “something extra” that helps distinguish them from the other 20+ films in the series. Yet I think the really crucial thing that links these three is their impeccable filmmaking – they are great films by any standard, not just great entries in this series. 

3 – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Peter Hunt, 1969)

One of the interesting near-misses about the 1960s Bond films is their attempt to build a loose arc in which the evil organisation SPECTRE (and its leader Ernst Stavro Blofeld) goes from a  shadowy background threat to primary antagonist. A few issues muddled that execution, though, notably the shuffling of the original planned order of films (which means Bond meets Blofeld for the first time twice) and the recasting of both Bond and Blofeld. It’s a shame, because On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a spectacular finale to the 1960s series. For many years seen as a black-sheep in the series, it is now well and truly rehabilitated in Bond-fan and cinema-buff circles. It still deserves wider rediscovery though. It is at once the first Bond film to give its protagonist genuine humanity and a dramatic character arc with the story of his marriage to Tracy; and at the same time one of the best action films of the 1960s.

The elephant in the room when discussing it, of course, is the actor playing Bond – George Lazenby, in his only film in the role. I agree with those who feel the Sean Connery of 1969 wouldn’t have worked – his performances in Thunderball and especially You Only Live Twice are too glib and suggest a disinterest in the role that wouldn’t have served this film well. I also wonder if the engaged Connery of the first three films would have seemed too invulnerable to serve the story beats here. At the same time, though, I am not sold on George Lazenby. He has great moments, including two of the film’s most difficult sequences (Bond’s proposal to Tracy, and the film’s tragic final moments). He is also a very convincing action performer, and apparently his physicality was key to wining him the role. But in the film’s more general business, he is too often awkward and wooden.

That the film can overcome the not-so-tiny flaw of a poor Bond at its centre says something about the qualities of the rest of the film. Everything else here is absolute top tier, starting with Diana Rigg’s Tracy. The filmmakers presumably chose Rigg – a big name after her role on TV’s Avengers – because they wanted an experienced actor alongside Lazenby to anchor the film, and it works. While it would be wrong to dismiss the earlier Bond women as simple or helpless characters, Tracy is certainly the most rounded woman in the series thus far, a title she held until at least the Craig era. Tracy is troubled without being weak – she notably holds her own, for example, in one-on-one scenes with the villain – and it makes sense when Bond falls for her. The film has to sell the tricky idea that this woman is the one that Bond falls for. Years later, in Spectre, we would see what happens when a film can’t convince us of that. But Rigg, the filmmakers, and (yes) Lazenby do that here.

The film was directed by the series’ regular editor and sometime second unit director, Peter Hunt, and it feels like he had a point to prove upon his promotion to the main chair. The previous directors in the series all had their strengths, but none show the visual sense that Hunt has here. While the increasing scale of the films had left previous directors seeming to either struggle to assemble the material (Terence Young in Thunderball) or falling back on spectacular but static displays of production value (Lewis Gilbert in You Only Live Twice), Hunt manages to imbue his film with a genuinely epic sweep and lush visual style. 

The action filmmaking on display here is also years ahead of its time. Hunt had, as editor, contributed to some boundary-pushing action sequences earlier in the series, such as From Russia With Love’s train fight. Here, though, he could build whole sequences, and the action here is spectacular. It is distinguished by extraordinary photography (the ski sequences, for example, were captured using camera operators variously skiing backwards and hanging in harnesses from helicopters) and editing that still feels breakneck decades later. The film has several of my favourite Bond action beats, including Bond’s memorable slide on his belly across an icy deck while firing a machine gun. 

The film was the first of several course corrections in the Bond series, where a particularly lavish or silly production (You Only live Twice, Moonraker, A View to a Kill, Die Another Day) was followed by a more serious or back-to-basics entry (this, For Your Eyes Only, The Living Daylights, Casino Royale). Crucially, though, this still feels grand in scope – it finishes with a spectacularly shot helicopter attack on a mountain fortress – but the correction was returning to solid plotting and rounded characterisation. It means that the film gets the best of both worlds. 

While the film did healthy box-office, it was perceived as a failure and frightened the producers away from anything as adventurous for many years. Its conclusion is still shattering, and the decision to go straight to the end credits without the smallest moment of comfort still feels almost foolhardy. Perhaps it was. But it also feels like an honest conclusion – compare the awful fudging of tragedy that occurs at the end of Licence to Kill – and redefined the scope of what a Bond film could be. It would be decades before the producers had the bravery to go back to similar territory again.

2 – Casino Royale (2006, Martin Campbell)

It will be apparent from my comments throughout this list that I have a certain amount of impatience with many of the Bond films of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Where the Bond films of the 1960s were class-leading action-adventure films, too often these later films were simply not up to the standard of their contemporaries. The Bond films often benefit in both critical and fan perception from being considered as a separate class in itself and not compared to the leading action films in their genre at the time. But compare For Your Eyes Only to Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Licence to Kill with Die Hard, or Goldeneye with True Lies, and you get a sense of how the series for too long dropped behind the standards of the modern action blockbuster form that they had helped to invent.

I mention this because, even more clearly in retrospect, Casino Royale seems to have represented a point of recognition by the producers that they needed to lift their game. At the time, it was notable as the series’ first explicit reboot, given us an origin story for Bond that took advantage of the opportunity to finally adapt Fleming’s first Bond novel. And of course it introduced Daniel Craig to the series, who was immediately well-received and provided a reinvigoration very similar to that brought by Timothy Dalton back in 1987. I don’t want to downplay the importance of either the turn back to Fleming or (particularly) Daniel Craig’s take on Bond, both of which are vital to the success of Casino Royale. But it also can’t be overstated just how much better made this film is than any Bond movie since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

An early example is the early chase through a construction site. This is a terrific piece of action cinema that is revealing of character (we see that Bond’s improvisation is what helps him chase down an opponent when he seems physically outmatched; but that his impulsiveness is also a vulnerability). At a simple visceral level, though, the action choreography in this sequence is far ahead of anything in the previous three decades of Bond movies. I think not only that this chase is the best action sequence in the series, but also that there is daylight between it and the next contender. What’s more, the later chase at the airport is also amongs the best handful in the series.

A popular narrative is that Martin Campbell is the director who revitalised the Bond series twice, having relaunched it in 1995 with Goldeneye. And while his work here is outstanding, because I am not so keen on Goldeneye I can’t help but feel there was also some change in the support and resourcing behind the scenes that makes this so much better (a feeling reinforced by the vasty higher production standards that remained across the Craig series). He is one of several Brosnan-era personnel who turned in career best work here. Daniel Kleinman, who had taken over the titles back with Goldeneye and had been providing decent-but-not-outstanding title sequences since, provides my favourite title sequence for the entire series. (The shift in Kleinman’s work stuck – I think this film let him decisively break from pastiches of Maurice Binder’s style to do his own thing). And as good as David Arnold’s scores for the previous three Brosnan films had been, he rises to the challenge here of a score that largely disavows the sugar high of dropping in the traditional Bond theme (which is very effectively saved for a kicker at the end). His use of both an alternate proto-Bond theme (based on the title song he produced with Chris Cornell), as well as the more delicate work used to underscore Bond’s relationship with Vesper Lynd, shows his versatility. 

It might seem obvious that the film is lifted by the return to Fleming, but in actual fact that is something of a mixed blessing. While the novel is surprisingly faithfully adapted, a lot of material is added, and the film has an odd structure as a result. The film’s first hour is an extended prologue to the novel, and the film has to re-start for a new mini-adventure in its last half hour. What it gains, though, is the strong underpinning of the story of Bond’s formative relationship with Vesper Lynd. This gives the Bond character a humanity that he had not had since 1969 and which would go on to inform the whole Craig era. (Dalton tried to take the character back to this place, but the attempt in Licence to Kill to manufacture a version of this kind of story for him missed the mark). Eva Green provides a strong counterpoint to Craig – more enigmatic than Diana Rigg’s Tracy, but still justifying her place alongside her as the key formative relationship in Bond’s life. 

When I look back at the review I wrote when it was originally released, I can see I spotted flaws that, to be truthful, are still there. (Much is made of Quantum of Solace‘s unpolished script, but I actually think Casino Royale needed one last dialogue polish – there are conversations throughout that don’t quite hang together properly. In her first appearance, for example, M rattles off a series of lines that would have worked as alternates to each other but feel unnatural presented as a sequence; and her crucial discussion with Bond about his role – “half monk, half hitman” – isn’t nearly as coherent as it should be). But what I was energised by was the film’s reinvigoration of the series – both actual and promised. Seen now, it is those qualities that are much more important and outweigh the film’s small flaws. 

1 – No Time to Die (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2021)

I know putting this at number 1 is going to seem like a deliberate provocation. And in a way it is, since I’ve already admitted above that these top 3 are pretty much interchangeable for me and comparing them is very much an apples vs oranges exercise. But the more I turned it over the more I felt it was an honest answer – I really do like this film that much.

I have written, alongside this list, a separate review of No Time to Die that goes into greater depth about what I like about it (note that review includes spoilers, which I will dance around here). But what is perhaps most relevant in the context of its placement at the pinnacle of this list is its engagement with the rest of the Bond canon. It manages to simultaneously bring closure to the Craig era of movies while also commenting smartly on the sixty years of films that precede it. Diamonds are Forever is at the bottom of this list partly because it shirked the task of following on from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and set the series off in a retrograde direction. No Time to Die is the opposite. It performs a near miraculous salvage job of the messy plot strands left by Spectre; and then finds interesting new directions to take the Bond character and franchise.

For some that means No Time to Die pushes the series into places that don’t feel like Bond – we don’t just see a romantic and emotional side of Bond, we actually see a domestic and everyday side to the character. Yet that suits an older Bond, and one in retirement, which is exactly where the preceding films had led him to. And in giving us a more realistic and mature Bond, the film also manages to invert and question longstanding tropes of the series, such as its treatment of women. Imbeciles might complain this is political correctness (or, to use a term I mention through gritted teeth, “woke-ism”), but apart from its intrinsic merit, this approach opens up fresh story angles for the series. The film makes a series of bold plot decisions (I think even its critics would agree with this) and they almost all come off.

That might seem to suggest that I think the film succeeds primarily because of the novel character beats it finds for Bond. That’s not right though. While I do appreciate its status as one of the short list of strongly character-oriented Bond films, it also does the core business of a Bond film very well. I have mentioned that one of the key successes of Skyfall was the way it weaved classic Bond elements back into the (until then) stripped-down Craigverse, and I think No Time to Die very capably continues that project. As much as I appreciate that this is a more human Bond, he still has that classic James Bond swagger when he should. And the film as a whole manages the balance between moments of grittiness and human storytelling mixed in with more over-the-top fantasy, gadgets and grotesque villains. This is, for example, the series’ most committed use of the classic villain’s base since the Roger Moore era, and it manages to introduce wild gadgets (a glider submarine!) without breaking the reality of the film. That’s the classic Bond balancing act at its best.

It is also a very successful action film. Cary Joji Fukunaga’s direction is exemplary throughout, and the film is, shot-for-shot, the best looking in the series, edging out Skyfall and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. (Fukunaga contributed to the screenplay, too, which I think helps explain how carefully conceived many sequnces are visually.) Every action sequence is distinct and exciting, and the score by Hans Zimmer is the best since John Barry’s retirement from the series.

No Time to Die positions itself quite deliberately as the ultimate Bond film, in several sense of the world. Its approach to that task has pissed some people off, but I love it. I have a hunch that in a decade or so, when the dust has settled, my view won’t be unusual. I think in time this will join the select list of Bond films – such as Casino Royale, Skyfall, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and Goldfinger – that it is popular for Bond fans to list as number 1.

The Ranking

So, in summary, my ranking:

26 – Diamonds Are Forever

25 – Die Another Day

24 – A View to a Kill

23 – Moonraker

22 – The Man with the Golden Gun

21 – Licence to Kill

20 – Spectre

19 – Live and Let Die

18 – Goldeneye

17 – The World is Not Enough

16 – Thunderball

15 – Octopussy

14 – The Spy Who Loved Me

13 – You Only Live Twice

12 – Never Say Never Again

11 – For Your yes Only

10 – Tomorrow Never Dies

9 – From Russia with Love

8 – The Living Daylights

7 – Skyfall

6 – Quantum of Solace

5 – Goldfinger

4 – Dr No

3 – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

2 – Casino Royale

1 – No Time to Die

No Time to Die (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2021)

(This review has very big spoilers for No Time to Die.)

No Time to Die is the 25^th in the “official” Bond series started with Dr No in 1962; it is also the final in the Daniel Craig sequence that started in 2004 with Casino Royale. Because Casino Royale explicitly showed us Bond’s first mission, the Craig films established a distinct timeline from the rest of the series, which otherwise always had a loose, ambivalent approach to continuity. (Before this, it was kinda-sorta the same character and universe from film-to-film, even though that involved a stretchy approach to time and some blatant contradictions.) No Time to Die explicitly closes out this separate Craigverse; but it is in dialogue with the entirety of the series. While the film finishes with the customary “James Bond Will Return” subtitle, it would serve as an excellent capper to the venerable franchise. This is, in many senses at once, the ultimate Bond film.

It starts with urgent business resolving some hanging threads from its predecessor, Spectre, which involves the return of Lea Seydoux’s Madeleine Swan. At the end of Spectre Bond had left the secret service and departed with Swan, and No Time to Die picks up with the pair touring through Italy. It is similar to the way that Quantum of Solace followed straight on from Casino Royale, and means that the Craig era has an unusual 2-1-2 structure, with a stand-alone film (Skyfall) bracketed by a pair of two-part adventures.

Swan’s return – a first for the series, which has had recurring secondary characters but has never brought back a lead Bond woman – is the first of the film’s many successes. Swan’s character was one of the major failings of Spectre – she was set up as one of the great loves of Bond’s life, but unlike previous attempts at such a character (Diana Rigg’s Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Eva Green’s Vesper in Casino Royale) Spectre had failed to make this work. Yet No Time to Die is able to rehabilitate Swan before its opening titles, with its (admittedly lengthy) pre-title sequence both filling out her backstory and investing us in her relationship with Bond. It’s a tribute to script, performance and direction that the pre-title sequence does this so economically, while also serving up an effective horror movie pastiche and a thumping action sequence. 

Those opening titles start with a pattern of dots that calls directly back to the series’ beginnings with Dr No, and continue with other imagery that recalls the titles of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (over a subdued but haunting Billie Eilish song). These are two of my favourite films in the series, and it is interesting that they are key points of reference here. While Dr No provides mainly cosmetic inspiration – Ken Adams’ set design being a key reference for the design of the villain’s base, and there are rumours / fan theories that the villain here was initially intended to be a take on Dr No – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a key precedent for a Bond film with higher aspirations than is the norm for the series. Peter Hunt’s 1969 classic is probably the most ambitious film in the series to date in terms of its attempt to give dramatic and emotional weight to the story and Bond’s character. While I don’t have a problem with more straightforward Bond storytelling (my favourite Bond films include such no-frills Bond-on-a-mission films such as Tomorrow Never Dies, The Living Daylights, Goldfinger and the aforementioned Dr No), we know from Majesty’s and a few others in the series (most notably Casino Royale and Skyfall) that the character can be taken to more interesting places. No Time to Die is firmly within that small group of more ambitious Bond adventures, and I think it is even more successful than its predecessors.

That is partly down to craft and technique. The production values of the Bond series were drastically overhauled at the start of the Craig era, and even against that background this is a step up. Fukanaga’s direction is continuously inventive and enhances both action and exposition. The cinematography, by Linus Sandgren, does not quite have the same extravagant heights of Roger Deakins’ work on Skyfall, but I think shot-for-shot this is still the best-looking film in the series. The stunt and action work is outstanding, with all the action sequences effective in different ways. And while I still pine for the return of composer David Arnold to the series, Hans Zimmer’s score here is the best since the John Barry era. The score lays down an aggressive and distinctly Zimmer-esque foundation but then overlays variations on the Bond theme (plus some nods to Barry and Arnold’s work) as well as other influences such as Cuban rhythms. Together all these contributions help propel the film through its considerable runtime.

(Last spoiler warning!)

All this is in the service of a screenplay that makes some bold (and, it has to be said, divisive) choices. The least interesting version of the non-standard Bond film is the “rogue Bond out for revenge” story – this is what we got in Licence to Kill and what many mistakenly take the underrated, misunderstood Quantum of Solace to be. No Time to Die is not that; it is in fact pointedly the reverse, since MI6 don’t initially want his help and Bond actually ends up pushing to be brought back into the fold. But it goes further in making not one but a series of bold plot turns: killing Felix Leiter (a decision that has weight because in the Craig era the series finally gave us a proper recurring Felix, played by Jeffrey Wright); eliminating both SPECTRE and Blofeld (upending our assumptions about their status as the ultimate villains); giving James Bond a daughter (and perhaps more radically, showing a more everyday domestic side to his personality); and finally, having Bond sacrifice himself to save his family. It reminds me a lot of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, which made similar unexpected departures in the Star Wars series, and pissed off a lot of people. Judging by my very scientific sampling of Bond fandom, three out of four Bond superfans were not keen on No Time to Die (though fortunately Bond fandom seems to have expressed this in a much more reasonable and less toxic manner than Star Wars fandom – why this is so is a topic worthy of study). But I like almost all of the decisions made here.

Some of these story choices are good simply for their surprising zig-instead-of-zag factor. Eliminating first the organisation of SPECTRE, and then Blofeld himself, halfway through is a great example. It’s also another way that the film manages to salvage the mess left by its predecessor. Spectre had thoroughly botched the return of Blofeld to the series, absurdly making him Bond’s adopted brother and leaving him belittled and imprisoned at film’s end. From this starting point, No Time to Die’s approach – almost completely ignoring the half-brother angle, and then using SPECTRE’s dispatch as a twist that enlarges our new villain – is an inspired choice that makes the best of a bad situation. It does cut against Bond history and tradition, but I think the Craig-era’s unique position as a carve-out from the rest of the series gives some license to try such things.

What’s also interesting about the elimination of SPECTRE is that the setup is a direct repeat of a scene from the earlier film – the gathering of villains that Bond is able to infiltrate. Yet where Spectre’s version of that scene was a gloomy and dull boardroom, here the meeting is dreamlike and grotesque, with bald waiters stalking the room as a robotic eye on a plate addresses the room. It shows the series learning the best lessons from Skyfall in layering some more fantastic elements back into the series.  Where the first two Craig films had stripped the series back to something much closer to the grittiness of the Bourne series, No Time to Die gets the balance perfectly right by having a realistic centre – both in terms of some of the plot details, but also a psychologically grounded Bond – in creative tension with more bizarre and escapist elements. I think it has helped the later Craig films that their key competition is no longer the somewhat dour Bourne films but rather the more freewheeling Mission: Impossible series – this may have emboldened the producers to draw judiciously on the more over-the-top elements of the series’ legacy.

The elimination of SPECTRE occurs during the film’s stretch in Cuba, and I think even many of the film’s detractors love this portion of the film, which builds to a rousing fight in and around the venue housing the SPECTRE conference. Bond fights alongside agent Paloma, played by Ana de Armas – who it must be said is outrageously over-qualified for her tiny role. In earlier Bond films this character would have been either a sexual conquest for Bond, or a sacrificial lamb killed off to raise the stakes. (Or both.) The film plays with both expectations, but reverses them with Paloma surviving, excelling in her mission, and not sleeping with Bond. (It is clear, incidentally, that the latter point does not come from any prudish or moralistic place – it is also strongly hinted that she might have been up for something with Bond if he had stayed longer.) The use of the character is a breath of fresh air for a series that as recently as Skyfall had struggled with its treatment of secondary female characters.

Given this, one might note that the credited screenwriters include Phoebe Waller-Bridge (alongside the director Cary Joji Fukunaga, and series regulars Neal Purvis and Robert Wade). She isn’t the first woman with a screenplay credit on the series, but it has been a long gap (Johanna Harwood was credited on Dr No and From Russia with Love, the first two films in the series). I would also argue that she is the most accomplished screenwriter to work on the franchise, on the strength of her sublime TV series Fleabag alone. It would be unfair to the other screenwriters to credit everything I like to Waller-Bridge’s involvement – and it must be said that there has been improvement, including with regards to treatment of women, in the scripts to which Purvis and Wade have contributed over their tenure – but whoever deserves credit, certainly there is a degree of emotional intelligence to the writing here that is beyond the series’ norms.

Look, for example, at the treatment of Loshana Lynch’s Nomi, who has inherited Bond’s title of 007. There is a much less interesting version of this film where antagonism between Bond and Nomi is resolved with a last-act recognition by Nomi of our hero’s awesomeness. At first glance that seems to be the case; but actually the trajectory is a smarter and more satisfying mutual appreciation. Before the film’s conclusion, when Swan and her daughter Mathilde have been kidnapped, there is a lovely small moment where Nomi insists she is going with Bond on his rescue mission. It is his tired but appreciative “thank you, 007” – signalling not only his recognition of her skills and legitimacy as the new 007, but also his fears that he cannot save Swan and Mathilde alone – that is the crucial step in their accord.

Small moments like this are important because throughout No Time to Die we have an older and more mature (in every sense) Bond than we saw in the previous Craig films. I have seen suggestions that by revisiting Bond’s hang-ups about Vesper Lynd in the pre-title sequence, No Time to Die is backing over the territory of Quantum of Solace. But I think this fails to recognise the difference in Bond himself. In Casino Royale, M tells Bond that he needs to learn who to trust; although once he has learned that lesson, she also offers the human comfort that Vesper gave her life to save his. In Quantum of Solace Bond is out for answers (not revenge!) and learns that M was right. At the film’s conclusion his loyalty to M is affirmed and we get the sense Bond can now forgive Vesper. At the start of No Time to Die Bond has moved on from the service but, as Swan notes, is continuing to look over his shoulder. The lack of trust that hangs over from his espionage days is clearly a hindrance to him properly enjoying a normal life, including his relationship with Swan; but it is clear Bond wants to do so. And when he visits Vesper’s grave, what he says is “I miss you,” and the note to Vesper that he burns reads “forgive me.” Both sentiments are quite distinct from where he was at either start or end of Quantum of Solace. His focus has turned to first, the qualities he loved in Vesper; and second, blaming himself for her fate, rather than dwelling on what she did to him. When Bond thinks he has been betrayed by Swan, it is a setback to this emotional progress that the balance of No Time to Die then sees him work through. So while Bond is still dealing with the fallout from Vesper’s betrayal, this is definitely new ground for Bond.

After the pre-title sequence we see Bond now alone in retirement, in a sequence that parallels early scenes in Skyfall. In that film, though, Bond was full of angst and resentment. Here he is clearly enjoying his life after MI6, even if it is also quickly made clear that part of him misses his old work. As the story progresses, and Bond is reintroduced to Madeleine Swan, his emotional journey is built on his regret at too readily assuming she betrayed him, and the challenge of integrating into his newfound family unit. While for some this is territory that may feel beyond the realm of a Bond adventure, I enjoyed the new angles this wiser Bond brought. I also think that Skyfall forced the series’ hand in many respects: because that film essentially fast-forwarded to a late-career Bond, a more standard take on Bond would have felt like backsliding.

(A related aside: I have seen criticisms of the films main villain – Rami Malek’s Safin, particularly in terms of his motivation and some details of his plan. There are some gaps in this respect, although I think they are not especially important and easily inferred from the material we do get. However this is where the film’s emphasis on character development shines through. Safin might lack some classic motivations in a strict causal sense, but the film is more interested in his psychological landscape. His emotionally stunted, possessive attitude is all-too-familiar and works in effective counterpoint to the more mature, outward-focussed Bond of this film.)

The character-based focus also enhances the film’s already impressive action sequences. In the pre-title sequence, for example, the moment where SPECTRE goons try to break through the windshield of Bond’s car is far more agonising because Bond seems so unwilling to respond to Swan’s anguished pleas. Later, a chase in Norway is intensified by the fact that Bond has Madeleine’s daughter in his car. Where too many Bond films have tried to liven up action with gimmicks, No Time to Die understands that the best way to enliven action scenes is to give them strong character stakes. Some may also feel that certain moments, such as those drawing on our established investment in a character such as Jeffrey Wright’s Felix Leiter, are cashing cheques written by other films. But isn’t that exactly what a film like this should do? What is the point of a 25^th entry in a longstanding series if it cannot leverage off our investment in recurring characters? Frankly, it’s an indictment on the series that it has done this so rarely.

Of course, No Time to Die is not just leveraging off the Craig continuity that dates back to Casino Royale­ ­­– it is also drawing on the rest of the series’ history. I have already mentioned the nods to Dr No end On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and the film’s ties to the latter are especially clear. Early references in both dialogue and score to Bond and Tracy’s refrain of “we have all the time in the world” signal that another great tragedy in Bond’s life is on the way. What No Time to Die does so effectively is to subvert the normal approach of both the series and the genre, which would see a moment of loss primarily in terms of its impact upon our hero. I have already referred to the problematic approach often applied to supporting women in the series, too-often dispatched to provide weight to Bond’s mission. Even those characters such as Tracy and Vesper, who are provided more individuality and agency, ultimately serve as moment’s in Bond’s story (Tracy as a great love loss; Vesper as a more problematic symbol of both love and betrayal).

No Time to Die flips this approach, and in so doing shines new light on tropes that have run through the series. In Goldeneye the villain says to Bond:

Oh, please James, Spare me the Freud. I might as well ask you if all the vodka martinis ever silenced the screams of all the men you’ve killed – or if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women, for all the dead ones you failed to protect.

It’s the kind of line the series would often drop in to add a superficial sense that Bond has a depth beyond his unflappable veneer. Yet it was rarely taken much further, and the casual dispatching of secondary female supporting characters in the series was often at odds with the purported interest in such questions. By showing Bond actually willing to die to protect the women in his life, No Time to Die is taking this thematic thread and treating it with a seriousness the series hadn’t been willing to entertain before.

So while some feel the films’ conclusion is a betrayal of the Bond formula, to me it feels a perfect counterpoint not just to the story of Bond’s failure to save Vesper in Casino Royale, but also to tropes weaved deeply through the fabric of the series. I know the ending has infuriated some, but I found it fulfilling and a worthy and earned conclusion – much as, in 1969, the ending of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was at once an affront but also the fitting end to that film’s story.

For my ranking of all the films in the series, written alongside this review, click here.

The publisher’s page is here and includes links to various e-book options as well as the hard copy. The Amazon page is here and they have a kindle edition. I can confirm that the pictures come up really well on the kindle. It is in the Google Play store here.

The following is a very kind endorsement from Jim Collins, Prfoessor of Film and television at the of the University of Notre Dame:

Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs should be required reading for anyone who wants to explore the relationship between visual culture and urban theory in a rigorous manner. Rowley’s analysis of Disney’s envisioning of the ideal community – from animated entertainment to theme parks to planned communities – is distinguished by meticulous close readings and his theoretical sophistication. He moves so deftly across media because he constructs such elegant paradigms for comparative analysis. This is simply a benchmark work.

There is a more detailed page about the book, including a chapter-by-chapter outline, at www.sterow.com/movietowns.

I am speaking tonight at a PIA pre-congress event, and this post should appear by the magic of WordPress as I’m speaking. I thought it may be worth providing links to a few of the pieces of writing that explore things I touch on in my presentation.

The Classic Hollywood Town

Here’s my essay going through some of the characteristics that make the Hollywood Town so alluring: The Classic Hollywood Town at the Dawn of Suburbia

Backlots

Some material on the Universal Courthouse Square set: A Pictorial History of Hill Valley.

And a corresponding piece on Colonial Street: And to Think That I Saw it on Colonial Street.

Disney

My pair of essays looking at the design of Disneyland and EPCOT, respectively:

• Walt Disney, Urban Designer
• Walt Disney, Urban Planner

A photographic look at Disneyland, sans people: Deserted Disneyland.

Seaside and New Urbanism

My look at the design of Seaside, the archetypal New Urbanist town: Seeing Seaside.

Place in Movies

A tangentially related piece about the power of “place” and “location” in films: Location, Location, Location.

Another article on place in film, this time about finding the places where movies were shot using Google Earth: Stalking the Movies.

And getting even more tangential, a couple of pieces looking at how films preserve a record of Melbourne’s urban fabric:

• Film as Urban Preservation
• Dogs in Space and Time

That should be enough to go on with! For those who came to the talk, I hope you enjoyed it.

I am talking tonight at Loop, and this post should appear by the magic of WordPress as I’m speaking. I thought it may be worth providing links to a few of the pieces of writing that explore things I touch on in my presentation.

The Classic Hollywood Town

Here’s my essay going through some of the characteristics that make the Hollywood Town  so alluring: The Classic Hollywood Town at the Dawn of Suburbia

Backlots

Some material on the Universal Courthouse Square set: A Pictorial History of Hill Valley.

And a corresponding piece on Colonial Street: And to Think That I Saw it on Colonial Street.

Disney

My pair of essays looking at the design of Disneyland and EPCOT, respectively:

• Walt Disney, Urban Designer
• Walt Disney, Urban Planner

A photographic look at Disneyland, sans people: Deserted Disneyland.

Seaside and New Urbanism

My look at the design of Seaside, the archetypal New Urbanist town: Seeing Seaside.

Place in Movies

A tangentially related piece about the power of “place” and “location” in films: Location, Location, Location.

Another article on place in film, this time about finding the places where movies were shot using Google Earth: Stalking the Movies.

And getting even more tangential, a couple of pieces looking at how films preserve a record of Melbourne’s urban fabric:

• Film as Urban Preservation
• Dogs in Space and Time

That should be enough to go on with! For those who came to the talk, I hope you enjoyed it.

For anyone who is interested in hearing more about my PhD research, I will be discussing it at Loop Bar in Meyers Place, Melbourne, on 25 July. Details about how to book at this link, although oddly it doesn’t mention the price ($20 for PIA or WPN members, $25 otherwise). (Update: here’s a proper flyer).

The write up of my talk is as follows:

How do the media’s depictions of cities and towns inform the way in which we would like to live? And what happens if we try to build the media ideal?

In the 1940s Hollywood movies such as It’s a Wonderful Life depicted the ideal small town; in the 1950s TV shows such as Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best painted a similarly idyllic picture of suburban life. Such imagery helped to market the new postwar era of suburban prosperity; but they were also a source of discontent as people grappled with the reality of dispersed, centreless, car-oriented suburbs and found them wanting compared to media imagery. Are Hollywood’s fictitious communities an impossible fantasy? Or are they a cultural memory of aspects of community that we left behind in the postwar era?

This presentation will trace the evolution of such images of community in post-war Hollywood films and television, and look at attempts by planners and developers to build places that live up to that imagery. It will draw on fictional examples from the 1940s through to more recent productions such as the The Truman Show, Pleasantville and Mad Men, as well as a photographic tour through built environments such as studio backlots, the New Urbanist town of Seaside, and the Disney-built town of Celebration.

It will be a multimedia extravaganza, so come along. The booking link again: here.

Max Brooks’ novel World War Z is a faux-documentary account of a zombie apocalypse, comprising a series of first-person accounts from around the globe as the undead take over. It essentially tries to game out the zombie apocalypse: if such an outbreak really occurred, using the rules we saw in George Romero’s classics, how it would actually play out? Could humans survive? And if so, how?

It’s an intriguing book, and its single-mindedness in thinking through its scenario to logical conclusions has justly made it a classic of the zombie niche. Yet it presents some obvious problems as a basis for a film narrative, and especially a big summer blockbuster. It lacks a central protagonist (the witness accounts are told to a central investigator character, but he’s essentially a passive, off-screen narrator). Its events take place over a decade, and in disparate locations. And it involves such massive, large-scale carnage that it presents budgetary problems for any adaptation. At the same time, those things that make it challenging to adapt are also much the same things that offer a point of difference from the glut of other zombie properties on the market (the 28 Days films, Romero’s Dead films, the Zack Snyder Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, TV’s Walking Dead, and all the rest).

Marc Forster’s adaptation mostly takes the most obvious approach to the dilemmas of adaptation. It invents a central character, retired UN troubleshooter Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt, who as producer long championed the project), who after witnessing an initial outbreak is drafted back into service. This device creates a suitable plot motivation to zip around the globe visiting various hotspots, and it limits the action to the opening days of the outbreak to provide some manageable scope (not to mention plenty of potential for sequels down the track if the film is successful).

The film also switches from the Romero-style slow ghouls Brooks wrote about to the more fashionable fast zombies seen in films like 28 Days Later and the remake of Dawn of the Dead. This has obvious benefits in allowing for more kinetic action scenes, but a zombie aficionado friend of mine pointed out the problem for genre buffs: if such a large scale outbreak of fast zombies occurred, the “war” would surely be lost in days, and the scenarios that Brook explored – centred on how to resist a slow-moving but near-irresistible scourge – would never come to pass. This means that the film’s distinguishing point from other zombie films is instead just its sense of high-budget bigness, with the swarming zombies attacking like the orcs in The Lord of the Rings.

What is disappointing about World War Z, then, is that it fails to give us enough of those things that should be its focus. In 2011, Steven Sodebergh’s Contagion gave us a terrific portrayal of an apocalyptic scenario that was filmed with a keen eye for plausible detail. While a mass-market blockbuster such as World War Z couldn’t be as clinical as Sodebergh’s film, it still needed to start with that same sense of curiosity about the likely response to devastating events. That requires a focus on things normally at the fringes of narrative: the way institutions and governments respond to crisis; military tactics in the face of unexpected opponents; the impacts of mass devastation on an unprepared civilian population; the geopolitical implications of simultaneous worldwide conflict; and so on.

World War Z nods in some of these directions, but it is too focussed on narrative efficiency to explore such things in more than cursory way. The depictions of a global response to the zombie threat are done in such a cartoonish, compressed manner that they never feel real, and the ceaseless narrative movement doesn’t allow the film time to convincingly establish the various locales it visits. Ultimately this sacrifices what should make the film interesting. If you’re watching a film called World War Z and don’t get a plausible view of the world war, then the film is really just, well… Z.

Instead of focussing on such things, Forster takes the safe route by adding more direct human interest, as Lane must undertake his mission to ensure the protection of his wife and two daughters. Yet this material feels so generic that I’m not convinced it really gives the audience any more of a human “in” than a Contagion-like ensemble piece would. Is a UN peacekeeper who has retired and spent a single scene in a kitchen cooking breakfast for his kids more relatable than one who is established in his element doing the job that defines his role in the story? I’m not so sure: it seems like a lot of emotional heavy lifting to be done by toast and pancakes.

The film’s other distancing element is another designed to foster mainstream success. As a high budget movie, World War Z needs an American PG-13 rating. That in turn means little gore, and World War Z is a fascinating case study in how essential blood and guts are to the zombie genre. I’m not a fan of on-screen gore, but the visceral dread of dismemberment is what gives the zombie threat its power. By cutting the film to deliberately downplay the bodily horror of the ghouls, Forster (with the help, no doubt, of the studio execs looking over his shoulder) neuters his own film. This is particularly the case when so many sequences use CG zombie hordes: the close encounters with zombies needed more impact to impart the undead masses with some sense of tangibility.

This is one case, then, where an R-rated cut of the film may be a substantial improvement. It seems possible that whole sequences are gone or truncated for reasons of ratings or runtime: one key group of characters, for example, are carefully introduced early on only to go missing, presumed zombified, off-screen. Indeed, the way the film is cut – with staccato edits and overly curtailed exposition – you can constantly see the glimpses of a better movie peeking through, hinted at by pieces of scenes that survive but seem like they should be longer.

This hypothetical revised cut should also try to re-imagine some sequences and return them from the lowest common denominator approach we have in the theatrical release. In one scene, a group of elite soldiers ride on bicycles to maintain silence and avoid a zombie attack. It cries out for the tension of extended Rififi-like silence, but Forster instead opts to compress the narrative by having expository dialogue over the scene. It’s a false economy, in which a five-minute sequence is fatally diluted to avoid a static thirty seconds of exposition. Other, bigger sequences are similarly wasted because Forster rushes the details of character and geography that would help make them meaningful. This is a film that you suspect would seem fifteen minutes shorter if it were ten minutes longer.

I’m speculating, of course. The footage for such a cut may not exist. The film was a troubled production, with a third act that was heavily re-shot and which now seems like a whole separate film-within-a-film. These later sequences, set in a research lab, feel conspicuously lower budget but are better for it. (They also find a nice way to nod towards Romero-style slow zombies). Even then, though, there are moments you feel could have been better with a more assured director at the helm. The movie shifts more decisively to suspense mode, rather than action, but Forster doesn’t establish himself as especially proficient at either mode.

Looking over what I have written above it seems harsh. The film isn’t as bad as I’ve made it sound. What it is, though, is a missed opportunity. It’s one of those films where you barely need to squint to see the much better movie that was almost made.

(Update, 29/4: This has started turning up everywhere, and The Age has an interview with Kaso here.)

Kaso also has a similar film for Sydney which isn’t quite as polished, but still very good.

As an aside, having mentioned the new SimCity, I would love to have tried out the game and potentially updated my previous thoughts on the franchise, but have had to hold off given my teaching commitments this semester. It sounds like by doing so I’ve been spared a frustrating experience, with mounting reports of problems with the game, including fixes that just make things worse. My favourite problem: the poor person whose city was filling with taxis.

At least you should be able to get home on Saturday night.

And a further update, 11/5: Tilt shift is obviously all the rage at the moment as The Age also featured this nifty short on their website. By Philip Watts, and presumably done completely independent from Kaso’s work, it nevertheless works as a nifty follow-up. If Kaso’s film is SimCity Melbourne, this is SimCity’s disaster mode. And it’s a clever play on disaster movies at the same time.

Ang Lee’s Life of Pi is one of the most visually beautiful movies I have seen. So was his Brokeback Mountain. But here’s the thing: the two films are beautiful in totally different ways. Lee is such a strong and versatile director that he seemingly reinvents himself for each movie; you could love every one of his movies but still not consider him as your favourite director, because he’s like a different one each time.

The film is an adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel about Pi, an Indian teenager whose family decide to relocate their zoo to Canada. While on the journey across the Pacific their ship sinks, and Pi is left stranded alone in a lifeboat with four of the zoo animals: a zebra; an orang-utan; a hyena; and a Bengal Tiger with the unlikely name of Richard Parker. This central lifeboat sequence is the core of the film, but is placed in the context of Pi’s spiritual journey. Pi has embraced multiple religions, and his adventure – narrated by the older Pi in a framing flashback – is used to illuminate his particular approach to faith.

The inclusion of the animals made this a special-effects movie, requiring as it does a largely computer-generated tiger in a central role. That crucial effect is amazing: realised by a team at Rhythm and Hues, it is a new high-water mark in photorealistic digital animals. It is vital that we believe the tiger because at the simplest, surface level, that central creature effect drives the film’s narrative. While Lee (along with Martel and screenwriter David Magee) has bigger concerns, the nuts-and-bolts of how Pi survives while sharing a confined space with such a dangerous animal are a fascinating foundation upon which to build. Richard Parker is effectively one of the leads of the film, and the relationship between he and Pi and is touching without ever getting too sentimental. The film never anthropomorphises the tiger, or downplays what a dangerous creature he is.

What is impressive about the way Lee uses special effects is that the technology has shaped itself to his filmmaking, not the other way around. So many special-effects laden films seem to be built around the strengths of the technology, giving us lots of the things computers are good at: vast crowds; strange creatures; elaborate sci-fi cityscapes; and so on. While Life of Pi has one or two spectacular effects sequences – notably the very exciting shipwreck – for the most part Lee uses special effects as another tool in his creative palette, using them judiciously to add to the dreamlike, hyper-real look of the film. (That includes 3-D, which Lee employs extremely creatively: while Lee doesn’t change my mind about the format – any more than these guys convince me we should all ride unicycles – he does demonstrate what a truly visionary director can do with it). While Lee has made effects-heavy movies before, I couldn’t help but contrast this with the much more traditional aesthetics of Brokeback Mountain (built on old-fashioned cinematography and a great eye for composition and location) and marvel at Lee’s versatility.

Not everything in the film works as well as the central lifeboat sequence. The structuring flashback device is a little clunky, and you can feel it being pushed to the foreground to cover the difficulties of adapting a challenging novel: at key moments we break into expository dialogue to explain a plot point or hammer home a theme. (Weirdly, there’s actually a double narration, since we get voiceover passages from Pi’s diary within the flashback). And I’m not sure there’s any real thematic depth here that can match the poetry of Lee’s imagery. But who cares? The film is such a visual feast, and such an extraordinary adventure story, that it is more than satisfying on those terms alone.