No Time to Die

Essential, and it requires all four previous Craig films, particularly Casino Royale and Spectre. It is the only entry in sixty years that is genuinely a conclusion, and everything it does lands in proportion to how much of the run you have behind you.

At a hundred and sixty-three minutes it is the longest by some way, and it earns most of it. The first half hour is three separate movements before the plot starts, including a prologue set years earlier that is shot as a horror film and is the best sequence in the picture. The Matera car chase that follows is the finest action in the Craig era.

The ending is the point and it is genuinely brave. For sixty years the one fixed rule was that Bond survives into the next film, and this breaks it deliberately, giving the character something no previous version was permitted: consequences and a stopping place. Whether you find that moving or a mistake is the argument about the film, and the sentiment in the last twenty minutes is laid on more thickly than the run had previously allowed.

Ana de Armas appears for about fifteen minutes in Cuba and steals the film. Lashana Lynch's Nomi is a genuinely good addition. Rami Malek's villain is the weak point, a man with a plan involving targeted nanobots and a grievance explained in a single flashback. Released after eighteen months of pandemic delays, and it was worth the wait.