Mission: Impossible – Fallout

Essential, and the high point not just of this series but of the form. Watch Rogue Nation first, without a gap if you can: this is a direct sequel that opens on consequences from that film and expects you to know who everybody is and what they owe each other.

The construction is what separates it. Each major sequence creates the problem that starts the next one, so the film never resets: a botched HALO jump leads to a nightclub extraction, which leads to a bathroom fight, which loses them the thing they came for, which forces the motorcycle pursuit, and so on for two and a half hours. Almost no action film sustains that for its full length.

The bathroom fight is the single best hand-to-hand sequence in a modern blockbuster, three men in a small white room with no weapons and no score, and Henry Cavill's reload gesture became a meme precisely because the staging is clear enough for a gesture to register. The Paris motorcycle ride around the Arc de Triomphe against traffic and the helicopter chase at the end are both done with the actor visibly present.

Production was shut down for weeks after Cruise broke his ankle jumping between London rooftops, and the take where it happens is in the finished film. The emotional thread, which is that every choice Ethan makes to save one person costs him something larger, is the closest this series has come to having a theme. If you watch only one of these, watch this, and accept that it will spoil the one before it.