Best Bond Films
June 4th, 2009 by Eileen Peterman
Best Bond Films
In light of the new James Bond movie Casino Royale coming out I thought that I would do a list of the best Bond films. Since there are only so many to choose from I decided to go with the top five Bond films, though even there I technically get into some trouble. What makes a good Bond film? First, it doesn’t have to star Sean Connery, it just seems like most of the good ones do. The most important things for a Bond film are a cohesive story, some beautiful scenery, and a really good villain. I suppose you could argue about Bond girls and their importance to the films, but really it is the bad guys who remain memorable from Goldfinger to Jaws, not the bikini clad girls.
Goldfinger (1964)
Arguably the best of the series. This film had it all. Strange deaths of beautiful women killed by epidermal suffocation after being painted gold, an outlandish scheme to infiltrate Fort Knox, and the best bad guys. This was the film that introduced Auric Goldfinger and his henchman Oddjob, and Pussy Galore. This was the film where the super spy paraphernalia really took off including the Aston Martin and the famous death by slow laser scene.
From Russia With Love (1963)
In his second outing Sean Connery hits the formula exactly right. This time Bond is in Turkey trying to avoid a SPECTRE trap, woo a Soviet defector, and find a Russian cipher machine.
GoldenEye (1995)
The best of the modern Bond films. Lots of things go boom, including much of downtown St. Petersburg, but beautiful women, exotic locales, and Sean Bean as the Bond bad guy he was destined to play make this film worthwhile. Pierce Brosnan reminded us with his suave wit why we wanted him to play Bond back when stoic Timothy Dalton got the job.
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
The best of the Roger Moore films. James teams up with his Russian counterpart KGB agent XXX to find a couple of stolen nuclear submarines. This one starts with an Austrian ski chase and end in an underwater city passing through numerous beautiful locales on the way. Jaws the henchmen was so good that he, and actor Richard Kiel who portrayed him, appear again in Moonraker.
The fifth spot would go to Never Say Never Again, the remake of Thunderball, which showcased an older and wiser Sean Connery as Bond but since it is not considered an official Bond franchise film this 1983 film gets only a brief mention here.
Runners Up:
Die Another Day, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Related posts:
- Worst Bond Films
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