Skyfall

Essential, and the most acclaimed entry in the series. It arrived on the fiftieth anniversary after a four-year gap caused by the studio's bankruptcy, and it was the first Bond film to pass a billion dollars.

Roger Deakins photographed it and it is, by a distance, the best-looking film in the franchise. The fight in a Shanghai tower, staged entirely in silhouette against an advertising screen, is the most beautiful sequence in fifty years of these, and the Scottish final act is shot like a western.

Its real subject is M. Judi Dench is given the central part after seven films in the background, the villain is a former agent she abandoned, and the film is an argument about whether an institution that spends people has any right to loyalty from them. Javier Bardem's Silva is the best Craig-era villain, introduced in a single unbroken shot with a monologue about rats.

The objections are structural and fair: Silva's plan requires a chain of events he could not possibly have predicted, and the final act consists of defending a house with improvised traps, which is a strange destination for a film this elegant. It also reintroduces Q and Moneypenny, quietly rebuilding the furniture the reboot had cleared away.