Furious 7

Essential, and the one that has to be watched knowing what happened. Paul Walker died in a road accident in November 2013 with the film partly shot, production stopped for months, and the script was rewritten so that his character could be given an ending rather than a death. His brothers stood in for remaining scenes with digital assistance.

The last four minutes are the result, and they are the most affecting thing in the series by a long way: two cars on a road, diverging, with a voice-over addressed to an actor rather than a character. It is sentimental and completely unguarded and it works on people who have not watched any of the other films.

The film around it is the series at its most unhinged, which is the correct register. James Wan took over from Lin and directed it as an action picture rather than a car picture: cars parachuted out of a transport plane, a sports car driven between two towers in Abu Dhabi, and a fight between Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson that destroys an office.

Statham's Deckard Shaw is introduced as the brother of the previous film's villain, which is the moment the series becomes fully serialised. Everything after this assumes you know who he is and what he did.