You Only Live Twice

Skippable, and it is the film that gave the world its idea of a Bond villain. Donald Pleasence's Blofeld, bald, scarred, stroking a white cat in a hollowed-out volcano, is the image every parody since has been built on, and he is on screen for about ten minutes.

Ken Adam's volcano set is the reason the film is remembered. Built on the backlot at Pinewood for a reported million dollars, with a working helipad and a retractable roof, it is still the most impressive piece of production design in the series and it is why the plot had to involve rockets swallowing spacecraft.

Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay and discarded almost all of Fleming's novel, which is where the series' habit of keeping the title and nothing else begins. The plot is thin: a space capsule is captured, two superpowers blame each other, and Bond goes to Japan.

The sequence in which Bond is disguised as a Japanese fisherman, with an eye prosthetic and a wig, is indefensible and unavoidable, occupying a large stretch of the second half. Watch it for the set and understand what you are sitting through to get there.