Mission: Impossible

Essential, and almost nothing like the films that followed it. Brian De Palma made a paranoid espionage picture in which the hero spends most of the running time with no resources, no team and no idea who betrayed him, and the single most famous sequence involves a man being very quiet in a white room.

The structure is the thing to appreciate. The team is introduced, given a job in Prague, and destroyed inside the first twenty minutes, which leaves Ethan Hunt alone in a safe house watching a chemist's surveillance tape and working out that he has been set up. The middle hour is almost entirely people talking in restaurants and apartments, with De Palma shooting it in canted angles and split diopters so that two conversations can be untrustworthy at once.

It made the original television cast furious, and the reason is worth knowing: the plot turns on Jim Phelps, the leader of the series for most of its run, being the traitor. Peter Graves refused to take part and several of the surviving cast said publicly that the film had desecrated the thing it was named after. They had a point and the film is better for ignoring it.

Two sequences carry it: the Langley vault, which is six minutes with almost no dialogue and no score, and the helicopter inside the Channel Tunnel, which is ridiculous and was state of the art. The plot is famously hard to follow on a first pass, partly by design and partly because a reel of exposition was cut. Watch it anyway. The series only makes sense if you see where it started.