Ranking The Bond Films (Part 3/3): The Top Five

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the release of Dr. No, the first film in the James Bond series. Directed by Terence Young, the movie established not only one of cinema's most enduring heroes but the entire action movie genre.

In commemoration of the series' beginnings, I have ranked all twenty-five films in the main series. If you haven't read Part One yet, featuring the movies ranked 25-16, you can do so here. Part Two, counting down the films ranked 15-6, can be read here. Spanning six decades and the tenures of six actors, the films are as fascinating in their own right as they are snapshots of the times in which they were made. One of the many great things about the series is that it offers so many entry points, with any one film having a wildly different tone to another, that there can never be a conclusive list of the best Bonds. This ranking is simply my own, and if you too are a fan, you will appreciate that disagreement is not just expected, but essential. Finally, here are my top five Bond films. Enjoy.

Ranking The Bond Films (Part 2/3): 15 - 6

Poster Credit: Sean Longmore

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the release of Dr. No, the first film in the James Bond series. Directed by Terence Young, the movie established not only one of cinema's most enduring heroes but the entire action movie genre.

In commemoration of the series' beginnings, I'll be ranking all twenty-five films in the main series. If you haven't read Part One yet, featuring the movies ranked 25-16, you can do so here. Spanning six decades and the tenures of six actors, the films are as fascinating in their own right as they are snapshots of the times in which they were made. One of the many great things about the series is that it offers so many entry points, with any one film having a wildly different tone to another, that there can never be a conclusive list of the best Bonds. This ranking is simply my own, and if you too are a Bond fan, you will appreciate that disagreement is not just expected, but essential. Enjoy.

Ranking The Bond Films (Part 1/3): 25 - 16

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the release of Dr. No, the first film in the James Bond series. Directed by Terence Young, the movie established not only one of cinema's most enduring heroes but a whole new genre. If Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest laid the foundation for the modern action movie, it was Goldfinger which built the house with its focus on big-budget spectacle, a larger-than-life villain with an audaciously implausible plot, and a stylish, implacably cool hero helped by high-tech gadgetry and beautiful women. As much as the Bond films have always moved with the times, often chasing trends, it took decades - the action boom of the eighties - before the rest of the industry began to replicate the high-octane formula which made the classic Bonds so timelessly exciting.

In commemoration of the series' beginnings, I'll be ranking all twenty-five films in the main series. This excludes the unofficial and mostly terrible Never Say Never Again, released by a Thunderball producer who had clung onto certain rights to the story, and the fascinating trainwreck which is the 1967 'comedy' adaptation of Casino Royale. Both would be near the bottom of the list if included. The main series alone offers plenty to be getting on with: spanning six decades and the tenures of six actors, the films are as fascinating in their own right as they are snapshots of the times in which they were made. As a result, one of the many great things about the series is that it offers so many entry points, with any one film having a wildly different tone to another, that there can never be a conclusive list of the best Bonds. This ranking is simply my own, and if you too are a Bond fan, you will appreciate that disagreement is not just expected, but essential. Enjoy.

Dame Diana Rigg Tribute: The Avengers Retrospective (Television, 1961-69)

[This article is being republished in honour of the late Dame Diana Rigg, Avengers star and a personal hero of mine, who died yesterday. If you'd like to read my tribute to her co-star Patrick Macnee, you can do so here.]

The name 'Avengers' tends to be associated with comic book superheroes these days, though for  British TV fans of a certain distinction, it instead recalls an iconic and much loved '60s show which beat the comics to the title on these shores by two years. The series was Sydney Newman's first major hit, with his second being the altogether more widely recognised Doctor Who. Starting out as a gritty spy thriller, the British Avengers came to define the swinging sixties through its playful embrace of abstract imagery, empowered women in risqué clothing, and intrinsically English sense of humour.

In its most popular incarnation, the series paired gentleman spy John Steed with a trendsetting, judo-throwing female partner. The most famous of these was Emma Peel, played by Mrs. Bond-to-be Diana Rigg. The series crossed over extensively with the Bond franchise, as Steed's previous partner, the high-kicking Cathy Gale, was played by Honor Blackman, aka Pussy Galore, while Steed himself (aka Patrick Macnee) had a supporting role in A View To A Kill. Bond and Who may have lasted longer, but few creations have been as influential to national culture as The Avengers was to sixties Britain.

 

Movie Retrospective: Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)

Many people discover Akira Kurosawa's work via the great Seven Samurai (1954), a movie rightfully considered one of the most influential ever made and a prototype for the modern action blockbuster. It has been remade in countless forms in the ensuing decades and its inspiration is evident in any ensemble blockbuster you care to mention. Much of its appeal comes from its ballsy, freewheeling tone, idolising its samurai heroes and their bloody retribution against villainous bandits. It's a film by a young director at the height of his popularity, having a great time dreaming up the Japanese equivalent to a boy's own adventure.

Some thirty years later, Kurosawa was out in the cold, shunned by a film industry back home which saw him as out of touch with contemporary Japanese audiences, his work was deemed too expensive and risky at the box office. It was only through collaboration with foreign financiers, including George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, that Kurosawa was able to continue making movies. Though he enjoyed success and critical acclaim during this period, the Japanese film industry continued to overlook him. As he grew older, the enthusiastic outlook of the young director of Seven Samurai morphed into a bleak pessimism, yet out of this darkness came not only Kurosawa's magnum opus, but what I consider one of the greatest works of art ever created: Ran (1985).

Fear & Loathing In Seahaven: The Modern World Of The Truman Show

The Truman Show (1998, directed by Peter Weir) released last week on Netflix. One of the best films of the nineties, if not the best, it tells the story of Truman Burbank, a man who discovers that his life in the island town of Seahaven is a reality TV show, from which he strives to break free. Although rarely used as a cultural touchstone today, the film was not only remarkably prescient in predicting the rise of reality television - Big Brother first aired about a year later - but in observing how real people's lives were becoming as artificial as Truman's.

The emergence of social media as a tool not just of communication, but performance, has over time further vindicated The Truman Show's depiction of modern life as a manufactured illusion. Where The Matrix was celebrated long after its release for its philosophising on the nature of reality, Truman has perhaps been sidelined for asking more challenging and directly applicable questions about human nature and the ways we have willingly become actors in our own lives.

When I Soar To Worlds Unknown: Symbolism And Imagination In Myst

If you so much as glanced in the direction of a computer in the mid-90s, you'll have heard of Cyan's seminal graphic adventure game, Myst, which not only heralded the advent of the CD-Rom as the format that would drive the future of computer gaming but also achieved the rare feat of becoming a cultural phenomenon. In 1993, everyone was playing Myst and when they weren't playing it, they were talking about it.

Completing one of the game's notoriously complex puzzles became a point of pride and social worth, bringing with it the satisfaction not only of in-game progress but also being approached by awe-struck peers desperate to know how you pulled it off. New sights and accidental discoveries were instantly broadcast amongst friends, desperate to claim the front-runner spot in the race towards the game's conclusion.

The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask - 20th Anniversary Retrospective

When The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask was released twenty years ago last week, it was with less than a year before the N64 was to be replaced by the GameCube. Although technically a quickie sequel, created in a single year using the same (albeit upgraded) graphical engine as Ocarina Of Time, Majora responded to the question of how to follow one of the most important games in the medium's history by taking its predecessor's epic scope and making it smaller and more intimate.

Producing a masterpiece on your first attempt can be as dangerous in many ways as a failure: not only do you have to deal with massively disproportionate expectations of brilliance for your next work, but are also bound by how much of the original can be changed or replaced without attracting ire.

How James Bond Became A Symbol Of Endurance In Uncertain Times

As I suspect has been the case for a lot of people, I've spent quite a lot of time over the past few weeks watching Bond films. The films I've watched have spanned the entire history of cinema's longest running series, spanning from Dr. No (1962) to SPECTRE (2015) and to be augmented in November with the oft-delayed release of the twenty-sixth entry, No Time To Die. It's likely that there will be a new Bond in place for the character's sixtieth cinematic anniversary in 2022, at which point the series will refresh itself all over again. It's a truism to state that the series has kept itself current by reflecting the mood of the era in which each film was made, but there has to be more to it than that for any institution to not only survive, but succeed, for as long as Bond has. Plenty of art reflects its time, but none have reflected so many times as Bond.

The character of James Bond was born in 1953, an amalgamation of various people author Ian Fleming respected during his wartime service. The character's name derives from an ornithologist, author of the work 'A Field Guide To The Birds Of The West Indies'. Fleming described the ornithologist's name as 'brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine', wanting Bond to be 'a dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened'. On the page and on the screen, Bond quickly outgrew the narrow confines of his conception. The essence of what made the character successful, though, has endured from the moment Ian Fleming sat down at his golden typewriter (really) to the present day.

Self-Isolation Of The Free Man: The Prisoner (1967-1968) Retrospective

The escalating scale of the Coronavirus pandemic is keeping a lot of people prisoners in their own homes. The struggle of those in self-isolation to escape boredom has already produced many strange and entertaining results, such as the man who ran an entire marathon around his drawing room. Thanks to the unprecedented amount of entertainment now available at the touch of a button, many are finding this a perfect time to discover films and television series which may have passed them by. For those looking for something which will resonate with their present lockdown, I have a suggestion.

The Prisoner ran from September 1967 to February 1968, comprising a total of 17 episodes. Airing in the Friday night timeslot traditionally reserved for such conventionally enjoyable spy fare as The Saint, the show tore up the rules of its ostensible genre - here is a spy show where the main character is the one being perpetually spied upon - and reflected social fears back at viewers through a lens of avant-garde abstraction, heavily influencing such later series as Twin Peaks and The X-Files and delving deeply into the substance of existentialist philosophy which HBO's Westworld can only emptily feign at.

Romanticism vs Enlightenment In 2001: A Space Odyssey and Interstellar (Archive)

[These articles were originally written around 2014-15 for a separate outlet whose redesign has resulted in several of my pieces being lost. I'm republishing a number of my favourites on this blog for posterity.]

2014 has been a great year for sci-fi. Guardians Of The Galaxy proved one of Marvel’s biggest hits to date despite starring little-known characters and lacking a star name among the cast; Luc Besson’s affably bonkers Lucy and Jonathan Glazer’s chillingly impenetrable Under The Skin saw Scarlett Johansson build up a fine run of form in the genre after voicing a sentient, amorous operating system in 2013’s Her; X-Men: Days Of Future Past made time travel an integral part of the X-movie universe; Tom Cruise suffered his own Groundhog Day in the middle of an alien war in Edge Of Tomorrow, and the Ethan Hawke-starring Predestination received plaudits for its integration of gender politics into an otherwise fairly rote time travel narrative.

Perhaps the biggest and most interesting event of the 2014 sci-fi revival was Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, standing out not only for being a rare original blockbuster in a galaxy of comic book franchises, but also its unashamed exploration of ‘hard’ sci-fi concepts such as time dilation, relativity and interstellar travel. If anything, the movie is at its least interesting when making concessions to the mainstream audience’s supposed expectation of action: Matt Damon’s cameo feels out of place and unnecessary, existing only to interject big set-pieces into a movie which had previously succeeded admirably without them. Just as The Matrix and Nolan’s earlier Inception disproved the notion that audiences are turned off by big ideas in their popcorn entertainment, Interstellar‘s success (currently sitting at a $622m return on its $165m production budget) is a triumph for all of us crossing our fingers that the recent sci-fi revival will be allowed to explore the genre’s more intellectual side alongside such pulpy delights as Guardians and Star Wars.

The Avengers star Patrick Macnee obituary, 1922 - 2015 (Archive)

[These articles were originally written around 2014-15 for a separate outlet whose redesign has resulted in several of my pieces being lost. I'm republishing a number of my favourites on this blog for posterity.]

Patrick Macnee, best known for starring as John Steed in the ’60s British television phenomenon, The Avengers, died of natural causes on June 25th 2015, aged 93, at his home in California.

Some of you may have read the article I posted about the impact The Avengers had in pioneering powerful female characters on television. For those who still remember the show, often the first thing that comes to mind is Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel, the show’s karate-chopping, catsuited co-lead between 1965-1967 who became an immediate fashion and feminist icon of her time. While the show’s array of brilliant and beautiful female characters may live most vividly in the popular memory for their impact on culture and beyond, it was Macnee’s John Steed who was its constant anchor, lasting its entire run from 1961-1969 before returning for two more years between 1976-1977 with the New Avengers revival.

Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Number One

With the 2010s' candle burning out, I thought it worth looking back on my favourite movies of the past ten years. It may have been a relatively uninspiring decade for mainstream cinema, but even the weakest year had a few standout releases worth celebrating. This post covers the top placed movie.

#1: SPRING BREAKERS (Dir: Harmony Korine, 2012)

How's this for an opening line: had F. Scott Fitzgerald been alive in 2012, he'd have made Spring Breakers instead of The Great Gatsby. Gatsby is a satire of the flamboyance, narcissism and excess of its time and the hollow fantasy of high society. It has entered into the pantheon of great literary masterpieces as an encapsulation of a distinctly American tragedy.

Ninety years later, Kris Jenner, matriarch of the Kardashian dynasty, holds a Great Gatsby birthday party, an all-night celebration of the flamboyance, costumes and excess depicted in the novel. Welcome to the future. People change, hairstyles change, interest rates fluctuate. Irony remains the universal human constant.

Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Number Two

With the 2010s' candle burning out, I thought it worth looking back on my favourite movies of the past ten years. It may have been a relatively uninspiring decade for mainstream cinema, but even the weakest year had a few standout releases worth celebrating. This post covers the second placed movie.

#2: LEAVE NO TRACE (Dir: Debra Granik, 2018)

Debra Granik's follow-up to Winter's Bone is a similarly stripped down, emotionally raw tale of a young woman living on the wild edges of civilisation, in intensely masculine environments, fighting for the survival of herself and her loved ones. Despite the similarities in their setting, Winter's Bone and Leave No Trace are diametrically opposed in the details.

Winter's Bone is a story about community, where a girl, Dee, is forced into adulthood to protect her small, destitute family following the disappearance of her meth-addicted father. Dee's battle for survival is based on her ability to fight through not only the bonds of poverty, but the institutions and criminal gangs which have evolved to take advantage of that poverty. In Leave No Trace, daughter Tom's life is defined not by the disappearance of her veteran father, Will, but his omnipresence. They are each other's entire worlds, living off the grid in national parks as a consequence of his trauma-induced fear of civilisation. Dee's story is about her protecting her family from the cruelty of society around her; Tom's is about her discovering the care and safety that society can offer.

Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Number Three

With the 2010s' candle burning out, I thought it worth looking back on my favourite movies of the past ten years. It may have been a relatively uninspiring decade for mainstream cinema, but even the weakest year had a few standout releases worth celebrating. This post covers the third placed movie.

#3: THE NEON DEMON (Dir: Nicolas Winding-Refn, 2016)

What happens if a film is less interesting on the terms set out by its creator than for themes and ideas it might have inadvertently stumbled into? In an interview with the Independent, Director Nicolas Winding-Refn stated that his film is about beauty as a class system and how female beauty has enormous power over men while also being exploited by them. While Neon Demon is visually striking and viscerally evocative no matter what its creator's thematic intentions, I find it a less interesting and cohesive film on the basis of what Refn claims he meant to say than more complex and original themes he might have elicited by accident.

As a look at the power of female beauty and its exploitation by men, Neon Demon works well enough, but is more memorable visually than thematically. Refn may present his criticism of the beauty industry in a way which potently contrasts the awe-inspiring aesthetics of the high fashion photoshoot with predatory ugliness on the human level, but such criticisms cover well-trodden ground and are not strong enough to justify necrophilia and cannibalism for much beyond shock value, despite the symbolism technically holding.

Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Numbers 5 - 4

With the 2010s' candle burning out, I thought it worth looking back on my favourite movies of the past ten years. It may have been a relatively uninspiring decade for mainstream cinema, but even the weakest year had a few standout releases worth celebrating. This post covers entries five and four.

#5: THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI (Dir: Martin McDonagh, 2017)

Three Billboards is a film which came along at the right time for everyone to completely miss the truth in what it had to say. It's a film of our times both in what it depicts and the critical reaction to it. In the film, a grieving mother, Mildred, erects three billboards attacking the local police chief for failing to make arrests following the rape and murder of her daughter. The reaction to these billboards exposes and deepens existing prejudices in Mildred's small town, with misplaced good intentions and vengeful self-righteousness ultimately turning one tragedy into a series of violent and bloody encounters.

The film plants itself in the middle of the battleground between the Trump right and the MeToo left, holistically observing their shared fondness for dehumanising others and reducing complex ethical and social dynamics to easy answers as fuel for sanctimonious anger. Mildred is driven by profound grief, but uses her billboard campaign more as an excuse for revenge and pushing her guilt onto others than to do right by her daughter. The town and its local police force are parochial and racist, choosing to see the billboards as an affront to their self-image rather than reflecting on the horror of a terrible crime going unsolved and their own shortcomings as individuals and a community.

Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Numbers 7 - 6

With the 2010s' candle burning out, I thought it worth looking back on my favourite movies of the past ten years. It may have been a relatively uninspiring decade for mainstream cinema, but even the weakest year had a few standout releases worth celebrating. This post covers entries seven and six.

7. ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD (Dir: Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

The divergent relationship between cinema and reality has been a defining characteristic of Quentin Tarantino's filmography, from his use of non-linear storytelling and multiple perspectives in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, to full historical revisionism later on. If Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is to be the final entry in his directorial oeuvre - grains of salt, though - it is an appropriate swansong not only in knitting together the director's most prominent themes and motifs (the dirtiness of Margaret Qualley's prominent feet is a very funny cap on a long-running and much beloved joke) but as both a tribute and lament to the end of an era of Hollywood filmmaking which above all others inspired Tarantino.
 

I could talk about how Once Upon A Time's cathartic rewriting of the Manson murders doubles as a deconstruction of the modern masochist obsession with the True Crime genre, or how Tarantino's melding of the real and unreal reflects how fact and fiction have become intertwined in the way we remember historical events and people. Worthy talking points all, but the real pleasure of Once Upon A Time is simpler: the oft-neglected joy of enjoying a beautifully made movie simply for the sake of it. From the sun-dappled cinematography to the lovingly detailed set design, it is a luxuriant snowglobe in which two-and-a-half hours passes in a snap.

Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Numbers 10 - 8

With the 2010s' candle burning out, I thought it worth looking back on my favourite movies of the past ten years. It may have been a relatively uninspiring decade for mainstream cinema, but even the weakest year had a few standout releases worth celebrating. This post covers entries ten through eight.

10. EX MACHINA (Dir: Alex Garland, 2015)

John Wick misses out by a whisker to Alex Garland's sci-fi thriller, whose central concerns of objectification and the difficulties distinguishing between human and digital interaction and deception have grown more potent in the decade's sunset years. Despite their very different aims, Wick and Ex Machina have much in common: both strip down often their often bloated genres (action and science fiction respectively) to the essentials, making the most out of a small number of ingredients rather than vaingloriously throwing everything in the pot and hoping for the best.

For most of its running time, Ex Machina limits itself to four characters, one of whom is mute, allowing us to spend the time with each to get a clear understanding of their characters, dynamics and their role in the drama and its subtext. Though not a subtle film in conveying its intentions, it mercifully refrains from didacticism, preferring to pose questions rather than tell its audience what to think. For those whose primary motivation is entertainment rather than intellect, it is as finely tuned and tense as any thriller released in recent years. By contrast, Garland's next movie, Annihilation, used its bigger budget to lean more heavily into opaque visual surrealism, ending up muddying its messages and lacking the focus to satisfy as a genre piece. Insofar as the old expression about limitations being a boon to creativity rings true, Ex Machina embodies it to an uncanny degree.

Retrospective - Goldfinger (Movies, 1964)

In honour of today being James Bond day, aka the 50th anniversary of Dr. No's release, I thought I'd post this article originally written for Flixist, which tells the story of how a youthful encounter with a certain debonair spy changed my life and turned me into one of the biggest Bond geeks you'll ever meet. For more Bond coverage, check out Flixist's Across The Bond feature, written by Matthew Razak and myself. I'll be posting collections of my individual contributions on this blog closer to Skyfall's release.

Real life at the age of six comprised mainly of three things for me: falling out of trees, falling into stinging nettles and running into lamp-posts. Since the loud, anarchic existence of a young boy is rarely conducive to interacting with the adult world, my mum would sit me down in front of the television whenever visiting her friends, issuing strict instructions to Not Move! On one such occasion, I had been perched on the white duvet of a bed facing a small television, three floors above being able to destroy the polite adult luncheon my mum had been invited to. After rummaging through her bag, she realised with horror that the Postman Pat video designated as my afternoon viewing had been left behind.

  

Retrospective: GoldenEye 007 (Gaming, 1997)

If you want to feel old, consider that today marks GoldenEye 007's fifteenth birthday. The seminal shooter of its time, few games have entrenched themselves so firmly in the memories of a generation: just imagine what teenagers of the late '90s might have achieved had it not been for Slappers Only in Complex, or Proximity Mines in Aztec. How many friendships might still have been going strong were it not for the unfairly diminutive Oddjob providing too great a temptation on the character select screen.

Though many of its players' fondest memories come from hours spent pretending not to look at their rival's quarter of the deathmatch screen, that pioneering multiplayer is only a small part of a legacy rarely acknowledged as fully as it deserves to be. GoldenEye 007 is a landmark achievement in game design, both very much the product of its time and a work whose influence is undeniably the source of the FPS-dominated gaming culture we play in today.