The Bourne Ultimatum

Essential, and the high point. It also contains the series' one genuine structural trick, which is worth knowing before you watch it: most of this film takes place before the final scene of Supremacy. The New York material at the end of the previous film is replayed here from the other side, which means the trilogy's last twenty minutes are a scene you have already watched, now with everything behind it filled in.

The Waterloo station sequence is the best thing in all five films and it is built entirely out of information. A journalist is being followed, Bourne can see every watcher through the CCTV feed being narrated to him, and nothing in it depends on a stunt. The Tangier rooftop run that follows, ending in a fight with Desh in a small bathroom, is the opposite approach and just as good.

It won three Academy Awards, for film editing and both sound categories, which is unusual for an August release and is a fair description of where its craft lies. Greengrass shot vastly more coverage than a conventional action film uses, and the cutting is what turns it into something coherent rather than something frantic.

The thing to be clear about is that this ends the story. Bourne gets his name, the programmes are exposed, the people responsible are arrested or dead, and the last shot is him swimming away. Everything after this point is a series looking for a reason to continue, which is the honest frame for both of the films that follow.