Rank the James Bond films

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Movie Forums Squirrel Jumper
Yeah. But at least YOLT has the little moments that LALD does not such as a big climatic villain plot or a Q scene to set up the gadgets, etc.




I'm surprised that you'd watch every Bond film if all of them are 1's or 2's for you.


Wouldn't you conclude after watching like 10-15 of them and not liking any of them, that you're just not a Bond fan and lose interest in the others?



I'm surprised that you'd watch every Bond film if all of them are 1's or 2's for you.


Wouldn't you conclude after watching like 10-15 of them and not liking any of them, that you're just not a Bond fan and lose interest in the others?
It's true I'm not a fan...
But as a cinephile though and being from the UK, it's James Bond. Got to at least give them a watch.



Yeah. But at least YOLT has the little moments that LALD does not such as a big climatic villain plot or a Q scene to set up the gadgets, etc.
I need to check out Live and Let Die. I'm pretty sure I must've seen it when I was a kid, but I don't remember it at all.
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Movie Forums Squirrel Jumper
Oh okay, for sure. Also three Bond movies I like which hardly anyone else seems to are Octopussy, The World Is Not Enough, and Die Another Day. I would not put these ones near the bottom like most do, and feel they are the most underrated ones.



Movie Forums Squirrel Jumper
Well it's hard putting them in order, but I guess my order would go something like this although I keep flipping some of them around quite drastically:

1. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
2. The Spy Who Loved Me
3. Casino Royale
4. Goldeneye
5. The World is not Enough
6. Licence to Kill
7. From Russia with Love
8. Goldfinger
9. Dr. No
10. Skyfall
11. For Your Eyes Only
12. Tomorrow Never Dies
13. Octopussy
14. Die Another Day
15. Live and Let Die
16. A View to a Kill
17. The Man with the Golden Gun
18. Never Say Never Again
19. Moonraker
20. The Living Daylights
21. You Only Live Twice
22. Diamonds are Forever
23. Thunderball
24. Spectre
25. Quantum of Solace

I haven't seen No Time to Die yet.



I watched and ranked all these films earlier this year I think but this thread reminded me to watch the new one. Updated ranking here:

01. From Russia with Love
02. Thunderball
03. The Spy Who Loved Me
04. Diamonds are Forever
05. Moonraker
06. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
07. Licence to Kill
08. Tomorrow Never Dies
09. The World Is Not Enough
10. Dr. No
11. The Man with the Golden Gun
12. Octopussy
13. A View to a Kill
14. For Your Eyes Only
15. Die Another Day
16. Spectre
17. Live and Let Die
18. You Only Live Twice
19. The Living Daylights
20. Quantum of Solace
21. No Time to Die
22. Casino Royale
23. Goldfinger
24. Skyfall
25. GoldenEye



These films are all a blur to me now. I am honestly impressed that the rest of you are able to rank them.



wanabe movie critique
1. Skyfall
2. Skyfall
3. Skyfall



A+: Casino Royale, Goldfinger, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Skyfall, Goldeneye
A: Dr. No, From Russia With Love, No Time to Die, License to Kill, Quantum of Solace
B: The Living Daylights, Octopussy, Live and Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me, You Only Live Twice
C: Thunderball, The World Is Not Enough, Moonraker, Die Another Day, For Your Eyes Only
D: Tomorrow Never Dies, Spectre, Diamonds Are Forever, The Man with the Golden Gun, A View to a Kill



Daniel Craig as James Bond

Ranking them from favorite to least favorite:

Spectre (2015) & No Time To Die (2021)

These two movies have some of my favorite action sequences in them, including the opening car chase scene in No Time To Die. Visuals in Spectre are some of the best of any Bond film.

Casino Royale (2006)

The most sylish and classy of these 5 films, downplaying the action but well done and nicely written, a close 2nd for me.

Quantum of Solace (2008)

At first I wasn't too impressed with this film because of the long waits between action scenes and after a while you get desensitized to these huge sequences, but in hindsight, after seeing Skyfall a 2nd time, I realize that this film wasn't so bad as it seems.

Skyfall (2012)

This film has all the cat and mouse and spy movie tropes packed into a single episode. They let each other go so many times it starts to look like a dance. Bond disarms his foes at point blank many times in this and it seems like everything is sort of half-assed. I remember though anticipating this movie and seeing all the hype around it, and truly, compared to what was in theaters there wasn't much else to get excited about.

My IMDb ratings don't reflect this ranking so next time around I will need to re-adjust my numbers and watch them all together for better comparison. As Bonds go, Daniel Craig does a fine job and fits the role nicely. His tone is more serious than the other Bonds and he seems to exert more in his physical performance than other Bond actors. But on the whole these movies seem much longer and filled with more actionless space.
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Thunderball
Casino Royal
On Her Majesties Secret Service
Goldeneye
Diamonds Are Forever
Goldfinger
From Russia With Love
Moonraker
Skyfall
Living Daylights
You Only Live Twice
Quantum of Solace
The Man With the Golden Gun
The Spy Who Loved Me
For Your Eyes Only
Octopussy
Specter



It's true I'm not a fan...
But as a cinephile though and being from the UK, it's James Bond. Got to at least give them a watch.
I've always found the ascetic flagellant tendencies of cinephiles to be odd.

Thou shalt not judge a film without having seen the whole film.
Thou shalt not judge an artist without having viewed their entire oeuvre.
Thou shalt not watch at any speed other than 1x.
Though shalt not view in anything other than the original aspect ratio.
Thou shalt not terminate thy viewing of a film before the film has ended.
Thou shalt not let thy liking of a film interfere with the viewing of it.

Thus, Rodent has to take 16 helpings of Bond before he may conclude that they're 1 star. Myself, I'm not watching all the Fast the Furious movies. I've seen enough. I don't need to go on a holy completionist quest to see all the various ways Vin Diesel can scowl and intone growly peans to familial duty betwixt CGI car chases.



Top 5
- Goldfinger
- From Russia With Love
- Casino Royale
- Dr. No
- Skyfall

Bottom 5
- A View To A Kill
- Octopussy
- The Man With The Golden Gun
- The World Is Not Enough
- Moonraker
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I know it's not the best Bond Movie, but I have to recognize my main man Sir Christopher Lee. I love Man With the Golden Gun so much. This is a Bond fan's Bond movie, all the cool Bond shit is there. It's thrilling when it needs to be, goofy when it needs to be. Christopher Lee's Scaramanga is objectively way cooler than 007, but we know Sir Roger Moore's Bond has that dash of silliness that will prevail in the end.









Best Bond is Casino Royale, man that movie slaps.



Welcome to the human race...
This was how my ranking shook out when I ran the whole series in preparation for No Time To Die.

1. GoldenEye

Admittedly, a good chunk of this is down to the Nintendo 64 game, but even so it goes very well by the standards of the Bond films that make it part of their mission statement to update Bond for a new generation (especially the post-Soviet era).

2. From Russia With Love

My favourite Connery, still kind of raw and not quite a Bond Film™ - but this is a film that works that to its advantage.

3. Casino Royale

Perhaps the quote-unquote "best" Bond film, though not necessarily my favourite.

4. On Her Majesty's Secret Service

A little on the long side and I'm not totally sold on Lazenby as Bond, but there's no denying how this gets the balance right between the franchise's capacity for adventure and its capacity to be something more (especially with a gut-punch ending that not even Craig's run could ever truly match).

5. The Spy Who Loved Me

The only genuinely good Moore one, but at least he got one that stands out as one of the finer examples of what the series is about.

6. Licence to Kill

Dalton might actually be my favourite Bond and it's a shame he never got more of a chance to prove that, but I especially dig this unrepentant exercise in chasing the lurid '80s thrills of Miami Vice.

7. Goldfinger

This used to be in my top 100 movies ever but I've long since revised this, anyway it's still a fun watch but one I respect more than enjoy these days.

8. The Living Daylights

Between this, LTK, and OHMSS, it might actually be better if Bond actors don't last more than, say, three films each. Another good "reinvention" installment.

9. Tomorrow Never Dies

Dalton may be my favourite Bond, but Brosnan is the one I grew up on and this one has plenty of extra factors - Michelle Yeoh kicking ass, Jonathan Pryce hamming it up - to make sure it holds up.

10. Dr. No

The original and the...most OK of them all.

11. You Only Live Twice

This is where things start getting dicey. In some ways they've got the Bond film down to a science - exotic scenery, elaborately-designed locations and props, memorable villains - but in other ways it dates itself horribly (disposable women, yellowface, etc.). Having Tetsuro Tamba as Bond's Japanese counterpart is a plus, though.

12. Quantum of Solace

I once called this one of the worst movies I'd ever seen, but surprisingly it's grown on me as a decidedly necessary continuation of Casino Royale's gritty reboot, actually daring to underline the severity of Bond's quest for revenge in a way that is relatively impressive compared to its allegedly superior successors.

13. Die Another Day

The Escape From L.A. avatar should indicate that I have a relatively high tolerance for goofy nonsense (as is the fact that I've seen all these movies multiple times) and this is very much true of the Bond movie so goofy that they really went overboard trying to course-correct for it.

14. Skyfall

The paradox of modern Bond movies comes in how they are supposed to address his flaws without compromising his appeal as a character, so this one really leans into the idea of him being an old and busted relic of the past a mere six years after he got a reboot - and then it sets him up with all his classic allies (Q! Moneypenny! A male M!) in an effective restoration of the status quo anyway. In this context, Deakins can only do so much.

15. Moonraker

Yep, the space one. Definitely bears the mark of a shamelessly rushed and rehashed production trying to capitalise on the popularity of Star Wars, throwing sense to the wind quite a bit even for this franchise. At least it's not obnoxiously silly.

16. For Your Eyes Only

Despite ostensibly being made with the intention of getting the series back-on-track after the extremely goofy Moonraker, this only ends up being a lateral move as it tries to go back to basics with its more traditional Cold War spycraft.

17. A View To A kill

Moore was too old for these movies when he started and he looks even worse for wear in his last one, though at least you have some of the best individual aspects in here (Walken, Jones, Duran Duran) to keep it from being too terrible.

18. No Time To Die

The attempt to not just reboot Bond but give him a clearly-defined arc from beginning to end reaches a bloated and anticlimactic conclusion here, once again harping on Bond raging against his apparent irrelevance while also trying to get more blood from the stone that is his all-consuming romance with an iconic character like *checks notes* Madeleine Swann.

19. The World Is Not Enough

Despite having a fairly novel approach to how it characterises its villain (I wonder if it influenced The Dark Knight Rises), this is a largely dull entry. At least Die Another Day is memorably goofy.

20. Spectre

The four-minute oner that starts the film is the perfect metaphor for the whole thing - it's long and technically impressive, but ultimately amounts to nothing.

21. Thunderball

The underwater stuff is neat and all, but there's nothing about it that wasn't done better in other Connery entries.

22. Live and Let Die

Somehow more racist than You Only Live Twice and it throws in that annoying sheriff character on top of that. The alligator-hopping stunt is cool, though.

23. Octopussy

Maybe they gave it that name to distract from how boring it actually is.

24. The Man With The Golden Gun

If I were ranking these in terms of how good the villains were, Christopher Lee's Scaramanga would easily catapult this into the top 5. However, the rest of the movie effectively guarantees it's in the bottom 5 (except for that car stunt - and even that has a slide-whistle over it for some reason).

25. Diamonds Are Forever

This is the Rise of Skywalker of Bond films. Yeah, I said it.
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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0



That's some bad hat, Harry.
My favs... in order of preference:

The Spy Who Loved Me
From Russia With Love
Dr. No
Goldfinger
Live And Let Die
Skyfall
GoldenEye
Casino Royale
Thunderball
The Living Daylights
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