Spectre

Essential on continuity and the weakest of the five. Its job is to connect the previous three films into one conspiracy, and the way it does that is the problem: a single organisation turns out to have been behind every antagonist since 2006, run by a man with a personal connection to Bond's childhood that no previous film mentioned.

The line in which the villain claims authorship of all of Bond's pain is the most derided in the modern run, and the objection is not that it is a twist but that it shrinks everything. Three films about institutions, money and grief become a family argument.

The craft is still high. The opening in Mexico City during the Day of the Dead, staged as one apparently unbroken shot that moves through a crowd, into a building, out of a window and onto a rooftop, is the best thing in the film. The train fight with Dave Bautista is a deliberate echo of From Russia with Love and holds up against it. Hoyte van Hoytema's photography of the Austrian and Moroccan sequences is superb.

Christoph Waltz is given very little to do with the part, the romance is underwritten, and at a hundred and forty-eight minutes it was the longest in the series at the time. Watch it because No Time to Die requires it.