GoldenEye

Essential, and the best of the Brosnan films by a wide margin. It arrived after a six-year gap in which the Soviet Union had dissolved, and it is the only Bond film that treats its own obsolescence as the subject rather than ignoring it.

That argument is stated directly. Judi Dench's M, the first woman in the role, calls him a sexist misogynist dinosaur and a relic of the Cold War to his face in their first scene, and the film does not give him a rebuttal. The villain is a former double-O with a personal grievance about something Britain did and denied, and the plot turns on an abandoned Soviet weapons programme nobody cleaned up.

Martin Campbell directs it as a proper action film. The bungee jump off a dam, the tank driving through St Petersburg with a statue on the roof, and the fight in the satellite cradle are all staged with weight, and Pierce Brosnan plays the part as the compromise everyone expected: Moore's lightness over Dalton's competence.

Famke Janssen's Xenia Onatopp is the most purely enjoyable henchman since Jaws. The tie-in game on the Nintendo 64 did as much for the film's reputation as the film did. Watch it; the three that follow are a steep decline.