You Only Live Twice (1967)

Fifth time around for Sean Connery as James Bond.

Pros:

• The definitive Bond villain base, disguised within a volcano and featuring its own railway system and a lethal piraña pool.
• An exciting scene in which Bond pilots the autogyro “Little Nellie” and is attacked by four helicopters.
• Donald Pleasence is creepily convincing as Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE.

Cons:

• Plenty of racial stereotyping that culminates in a ludicrous scene in which Bond is made to be “Japanese”.
• Bond: “Why do Chinese girls taste different from all other girls?...Like Peking duck is different from Russian caviar. But I love them both.”
• A slightly tired feel. The Bond formula is well established already by this point and was possibly becoming a bit of a straitjacket.

Stand by Me (1986)

Sweet and touching coming-of-age drama about four American boys who set off along the railway to find the body of a dead child.

There are scares and surprises along the way (an attack dog, nearly being run down by a train, a nasty gang of kids led by Kiefer Sutherland), but the real focus of the story is the relationship between the four boys and what else is going on in their emotional lives.

Gordie (Wil Wheaton) is bereaved after losing a brother he failed to live up to in the eyes of his devastated parents. (As an adult, played by Richard Dreyfuss, he narrates the story he has now turned into a book.) And Chris (River Phoenix) has been written off as a no-hoper. Meanwhile Teddy (Corey Feldman) is not quite right in the head and Vern (Jerry O'Connell) has an older brother in the nasty gang.

It’s a poignant tale about friendship and growing up.

Rob Reiner’s direction is unfussy and perfectly judged, allowing the characters to develop and the story to unfold at just the right pace.

Defiance (2008)

War saga set in Belarus in 1941. It tells the story of the Bielski partisans, who saved Jewish people from the Nazis by hiding in the forest and building a resistance community. It’s also the story of four brothers, played by Daniel Craig, Liev Schreibe, Jamie Bell and George MacKay.

There are harrowing moments, as you might expect, but also unexpected lightness and even romance.

Daniel Craig is as charismatic as ever, even if his accent comes and goes at times.

1917 (2019)

A stunning and emotional WWI film directed by Sam Mendes.

Plot: two young British lance corporals (played by George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman) are sent on a mission to call off an attack that would see the Germans slaughtering 1,600 men.

The scene in which the pair start off by crossing no-man’s land is especially nail-biting.

The music by Thomas Newman is stirring and often terrifying, heightening the tension at all the right moments.

The way it’s shot is remarkable, too, with highly believable extended takes (such as a long walk through the trenches) and no intrusive stylisation.

It’s extremely gripping, and also very moving. The scene in which MacKay stumbles across a French woman and a baby (not her own) sheltering in an abandoned building will stay with me for a while, as will the image of the German plane being shot down and landing where you least expect it to.

Black Hawk Down (2001)

Brutal military drama by Ridley Scott that details the US involvement in the 1993 civil war in Somalia.

A UN taskforce is sent into Mogadishu to capture the leader of the militia, Mohamed Farrah Hassan Aidid. It sounds straightforward enough, but the mission goes horribly wrong when a US helicopter is shot down. Chaos ensues, and the Americans seem naive and ill-prepared. You know there isn’t going to be a simple resolution or a happy ending.

The film is extremely violent – sometimes almost unbearably so. In no way does it glamorise war (you see body parts galore), but – perhaps inevitably – it does only show it from the Americans’ perspective.

The ensemble cast has no real star or focal point. This has the benefit of making it about the team rather than any one “hero”.

Being a Ridley Scott film, it looks stunning and the soldiers’ relentless, harrowing experience of being under constant attack is detailed brilliantly.

In the Heart of the Sea (2015)

The whaleship Essex was sunk in 1820 by a large sperm whale. That true story caught the imagination of Herman Melville, who published his masterpiece novel Moby-Dick in 1851. This film, adapted from the book of the same name by Nathaniel Philbrick, tells the story of the Essex in flashback as one of the few survivors of the ship recounts his tale to Melville.

Ron Howard’s direction is vivid and exciting. I’m not quite convinced by Chris “Thor” Hemsworth as Owen Chase. Is it his diction or just his difficulty with mastering the Nantucket accent that makes his garbled speech so hard to understand?

The film is able to sidestep ethical issues about whaling because they didn’t trouble anyone in the 1800s. It can’t avoid the topic of cannibalism, though, although it doesn’t go into the religious justifications for the deed that were referenced in Alive.

The visuals are striking. Often the film looks peculiarly coloured and dream-like. That’s not because the CGI is poor – in fact, it’s incredibly convincing. It’s because some of the scenes are lit in a way that just doesn’t feel “real”. But – given the flashback mechanism – you could argue that this is what vivid memories look like, given their intensity.

It’s a satisfyingly well-told story that never flags.

For Your Eyes Only (1981)

There are a few unusual things about this James Bond film. For a start you see the performer of the song in the title sequence – in this case Sheena Easton. Secondly, the film ends with Margaret and Dennis Thatcher taking a phone call from a parrot they believe to be James Bond. Impersonators Janet Brown and John Wells play the pair, and it’s a genuinely funny scene, but it’s certainly not what you expect from a film in this series.

For Your Eyes Only is slightly grittier than the daft Moonraker, and it’s one of the more watchable Roger Moore films.

Topol is easy to like as the nut-guzzling Milos Columbo, while Carole Bouquet is fairly good as Melina Havelock. Julian Glover is the unspectacular villain Aristotle Kristatos. The subplot about Bibi Dahl (Lynn-Holly Johnson), the young ice skater, is somewhat baffling and could have been cut entirely.

The skiing and rock-climbing sequences are fairly exciting, as is the underwater battle in a sunken ship filled with corpses. Also good to see Bond and his girlfriend pottering about in a submersible.

As if all that wasn’t enough, some of the action scenes are accompanied by funky music.