Casino Royale

Essential, and the single best place to start if you have never seen a Bond film. It is a complete reboot: this is his first mission at double-O level, nothing from the previous twenty films is continuous with it, and no prior knowledge is required or useful.

It is also the first adaptation of Fleming's first novel, fifty-three years after publication, and it keeps the thing that made the book work. The centrepiece is a card game, played for stakes that matter, between two men who are both frightened, and the film gets more tension out of a table than the previous era got out of satellites. The torture scene that follows is close to unwatchable and is lifted almost directly from the page.

Daniel Craig's casting prompted an organised campaign against it before release, mostly about his hair, and the first ten minutes answered it: a black-and-white flashback of a sordid killing in a toilet, then a foot chase across a construction site in Madagascar that is the best pure action sequence in the series. Martin Campbell, who had restarted the series once already with GoldenEye, directs.

The relationship with Vesper is the real subject, and Eva Green plays a woman who matches him line for line and is in an impossible position from her first scene. The ending is a betrayal and a death that the next four films are all, in different ways, about. Watch it first.