Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

Essential, and this is the point where the series stops being dippable. Everything from here to the end is one continuous story: the villain introduced in this film is still a factor two films later, Ilsa Faust becomes central, and Fallout is a direct sequel that assumes you remember the details.

Christopher McQuarrie took over and has directed every entry since, which changed the house style. The films become tighter, drier and much more interested in tradecraft: plans that are explained as they fail, teams improvising around a compromised asset, and set pieces built on a specific problem rather than on a location. The opera house in Vienna is the best example, an assassination staged during a performance of Turandot where three different parties are all waiting for the same crescendo.

Rebecca Ferguson arrives fully formed. Ilsa is a British agent embedded in the enemy organisation whose actual loyalties stay genuinely unclear for most of the film, and the series had never had a character whose interests simply did not align with Ethan's. She is the best addition in twenty years of these.

The opening, with Cruise on the outside of an Airbus A400M as it takes off, is the stunt the marketing used and the underwater vault sequence in Morocco is the better piece of filmmaking. Solomon Lane is a thin villain compared to Hoffman's and the film works around it by making the organisation the threat instead.