The Bourne Identity

Essential, and the right place to start whatever you do with the rest. A man is fished out of the Mediterranean with two bullets in his back and no idea who he is, and the film's engine is that he finds out what he can do before he finds out what he is. He clears a room, reads an exit, speaks four languages and knows the sightlines of a building he has never entered, and every one of those discoveries frightens him.

Doug Liman spent three years getting it made and the production was difficult enough to become its own story: a release pushed back by the better part of a year, reshoots, a studio that had lost confidence, and a director with a reputation for improvising on a budget this size. What came out is quieter than any spy film of its era. The fight in Marie's apartment lasts under a minute and ends with a ballpoint pen, and the car chase is through Paris in a Mini because that is what was parked outside.

The relationship is the part people underrate. Franka Potente's Marie agrees to drive him to Paris for ten thousand dollars and spends the rest of the film deciding whether to stay, and Liman lets whole scenes be about two people in a car being tired. The series never had anything like it again, and Supremacy disposes of her in its first ten minutes.

Almost nothing survives from Robert Ludlum's 1980 novel beyond the premise and some names: the book's villain is Carlos the Jackal and its plot runs on a decades-old Cold War structure. Treat the films as their own thing. This one is the best-made of them.