Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

Essential, and the best entry point for anybody who has seen none of these. It assumes almost nothing, explains what little it needs in the first ten minutes, and is the film where the series worked out what it was for.

Brad Bird came from animation, had never shot live action, and brought a sense of comic timing that none of the previous directors had. The premise is that everything breaks: the agency is disavowed and disappears, so the team has no support, no budget and no backup, and every piece of equipment malfunctions at the worst possible moment. A glove that holds a man to glass stops working halfway up a building. A projection screen in a Kremlin corridor collapses mid-deception. The comedy and the suspense come from the same source.

The Burj Khalifa sequence is the one everybody knows and it deserves it: Cruise actually outside the tallest building in the world, shot on IMAX cameras so the vertical scale is real, with the tension coming from a sandstorm rolling in rather than from a bad guy. The Mumbai finale in an automated car park is the weakest stretch and is still fine.

Jeremy Renner was brought in as a possible succession plan that never happened, and Simon Pegg's Benji is promoted from technician to field agent here, which is the version of the character the rest of the series uses. After this point the films start connecting to each other, so this is the last one you can comfortably watch alone.