Watching No Time to Die, one gets a real sense of how Bond films must all adhere to a time-honoured recipe.
You can reinvent the character as much as you want, but if you don’t have the explosions and car chases, close combat and grandiose, twitchy villains, you risk breaking too dangerously with precedent.
In Daniel Craig, we have a more caring, vulnerable 007, capable of remorse, but also of falling in love, first with Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, and now (and perhaps conveniently) with the psychiatrist, Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux).
In No Time to Die, that relationship is shunted into surprising new areas, as Bond’s emotional development comes full circle: but director Cary Joji Fukunaga has managed to do this while playing gloriously to the franchise’s traditions.
An SUV car chase through an icy Norwegian wood is among the best Bond action sequences yet filmed, and Ernst Blofeld makes way for a still more magnificently unhinged villain.
Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek) plots his tilt at global domination from a Japanese island, and Bond’s attempts to infiltrate it knowingly refer to the Connery-era classics Dr. No and You Only Live Twice.
This balancing of innovation and tradition is impressive, especially when you realise that Fukunaga wasn’t originally supposed to be directing it at all.
Danny Boyle was first choice, but left in a row over the script, which was then rewritten by old hands Neal Purvis and Robert Wade: Fukunaga came on board and Phoebe Waller-Bridge was hired to add some jokes.
The film emerges into a changed and devastated landscape, with cinema-goers still not keen on piling themselves into darkened, humid auditoriums to be sprayed with stray lumps of popcorn for the bones of three hours.
Might No Time To Die change all that? If it doesn’t, I’m not sure what will, because this is full-on Bond, the kind of noisy and histrionic spectacle fans of the franchise have long been craving.
As the film opens, James has hung up his Walter PPK and is living happily with Madeleine. But, of course, a happy Bond is a boring Bond and he’s dragged back into the game when his old friend Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) shows up.
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A potentially devastating bioweapon codenamed Hercules has been stolen by bad actors (not literally of course), who now intend to put it to devastating use.
Bond suspects the dreaded hand of Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), now cooling his heels in Belmarsh Prison. When Bond visits him, he discovers he has a new enemy to worry about.
That would be Safin (Malek), a preening, touchy terrorist with a grudge against Madeleine, and consequently Bond. And in the midst of all this, James discovers there are more important things in life than hunting down supervillains.
As if that isn’t complicated enough, M (Ralph Fiennes) had a hand in developing the Hercules programme and is now feeling pretty bad about it.
And a tense reunion is not helped by the fact that Bond’s ‘007’ active service number has now been assigned to another agent, Nomi (Lashana Lynch). “It’s just a number,” Bond says, but he seems miffed.
With so many balls in the air, No Time To Die might be expected to drop a few of them.
Somehow, that doesn’t happen and despite a slight dip in energy midway through, Fukunaga’s film is very well paced, extremely watchable and a big-screen visual treat.
Though the mood is dour, there’s humour too, and Ana de Armas makes a delightful cameo as Paloma, a rookie Cuban CIA agent who insists to Bond that she’s only had “three weeks training” before knocking seven bells out of numerous assassins.
If all Bond plots are fundamentally silly, No Time To Die embraces the daftness with aplomb.
Ben Whishaw and Naomie Harris return as Q and Moneypenny, though one wonders if, with Craig departing, they’ll be tempted to do the same. They’ve brought wit and style to previously formulaic roles.
As for Craig, he leaves the stage with nothing left to prove. He is, for me, the best Bond of them all, the first one since Connery who actually looks like he’d kick your head in, but also a fine actor who somehow managed to give his 007 three dimensions and a soul.
Watching him, it was almost possible to believe that all this nonsense was real.
In 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin visited a high-rise housing project at Ivry in the suburbs of Paris, where crowds flocked to cheer the first man in space.
The estate would subsequently be renamed in his honour, but almost 60 years later, the Cité Gagarine is in a parlous state.
In fact, it was demolished in 2019, but not before Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh managed to shoot this moving and poetic debut feature.
Youri (Alséni Bathily) is a dreamy 16-year-old named after Gagarin and totally obsessed with space travel.
The tower block is the only home he’s ever known, and when it’s condemned and evacuated, he decides to stay behind, hiding from the demolition crews and creating a kind of improvised space capsule for himself.
From this place, Paris proper is not visible, its cafés and boulevards a distant dream, but Youri finds solace on the tower’s roof, where banks of TV satellite dishes make Ivry look like Cape Canaveral.
It’s a dreamy film, but while most French movies depict the cités as dreary hellholes, Gagarine proves that home is where the heart is.
The documentary charts Oliver Sacks' extraordinary life
Oliver Sacks: His Own Life (15A, IFI, 110mins)
Like one of those grand old 19th century polymaths, Oliver Sacks achieved great things in numerous fields during his remarkable life.
A neurologist, naturalist and science historian, he earned worldwide fame through a series of bestselling books that described his work with patients.
In January of 2015, after discovering he had terminal cancer, Sacks invited filmmaker Ric Burns to his Greenwich Village apartment for the first of a series of in-depth conversations. The result: this fascinating documentary.
Born in London in 1933, Sacks fled to America in the 1960s after his mother, a brilliant but difficult woman, called him “an abomination” when he told her he was gay.
He would spend many decades coming to terms with his own sexuality, but meanwhile, he blazed a brilliant if sometimes controversial trail in his chosen field, famously restoring consciousness to a group of sleeping-sickness patients at New York’s Beth Abraham hospital.
With humour and insight, Sacks describes his extraordinary life as it’s about to end in this fascinating and moving documentary.
