For Your Eyes Only

Skippable, and the most interesting of the optional Moore films. It is an explicit apology for Moonraker: no space, almost no gadgets, a plot about recovering a targeting device from a sunken ship, and an ally who turns out to be the villain, which the series almost never does.

John Glen, another editor promoted to director, made it as a thriller with real stakes, and two sequences stand out. The climb up a sheer rock face to a monastery, done with a climber actually falling, is the most physically tense thing in the Moore era. The car chase in a Citroën 2CV, in which Bond's gadget car has already been destroyed and he is reduced to the slowest vehicle available, is the best joke the series has made at its own expense.

Melina's arc is a revenge plot with a crossbow, and the film gives her a genuine argument with Bond about what revenge costs, which is unusual. It also opens with Bond visiting his wife's grave, the only acknowledgement in twelve years that On Her Majesty's Secret Service happened.

Against it: Moore is fifty-three and the film pairs him with a woman less than half his age in a subplot nobody wanted, and the pre-title sequence disposes of Blofeld in a manner that reads as a rights-dispute joke. Worth it for the climb.