A View to a Kill

Skippable, and the sad one. Roger Moore was fifty-seven, older than his co-star's mother, and has said since that he realised during production that he had stayed too long. The film works around him constantly, and the romantic scenes are genuinely uncomfortable.

The villain is the best thing in it. Christopher Walken's Max Zorin is a former Soviet experiment, a financier with a plan to flood Silicon Valley and corner the microchip market, and he plays the part as somebody who finds the violence funny. The sequence in which he machine-guns his own workforce in a flooding mine, laughing, is the most disturbing thing in the Moore era by some distance.

Grace Jones's May Day is a genuine presence and the film does not know what to do with her beyond a late change of heart. Duran Duran's title song remains the only Bond theme to reach number one in the United States, and the Golden Gate Bridge finale is a decent set piece shot largely on a stage.

The rest is a steeplechase with a doped horse, a fire engine chase played for laughs, and a Paris sequence that ends with a parachute off the Eiffel Tower. Moore left after this, and the series went looking for somebody who could take it seriously.