Every James Bond Movie, Ranked Worst to Best
With this month's arrival (finally!) of No Time to Die, there have now been 25 official films in the EON-produced James Bond film franchise based on author Ian Fleming's British spy character. In the gallery on this page, we rank every one of those films—plus two additional Bond features from outside producers—from worst to best based on their Metascores, which represent the consensus of a group of top professional film critics.
Right now, it's fairly easy to find most of the Bond films on streaming services (and if it's not on the streaming service you have, it likely will be shortly, as the films are deleted from and re-added to various services every few months). That could change in the future thanks to a recent deal by Amazon to acquire MGM, which currently holds the home video rights to most of the Bond catalog, though there are no definitive plans to make Prime Video the exclusive home of 007 ... yet.
All photos courtesy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios except Casino Royale (1967) by Columbia Pictures and Never Say Never Again by Warner Bros.
The year: 1967
The 007: Sean Connery
The (non-UK) location(s): Hong Kong, Tokyo, Hawaii, Cape Cod
The theme song: "You Only Live Twice" performed by Nancy Sinatra
The fifth official Bond film finds Sean Connery's 007 faking his own assassination so that he can travel to Japan, undergo ninja training (!), and infiltrate Blofeld's secret base inside a volcano from which the SPECTRE baddie (played by Donald Pleasence) hopes to start a nuclear war. It almost sounds like a Bond parody, but for that you'd have to watch the non-canonical Casino Royale, which opened in theaters just a few months before Twice.
It was the first of three Bond films directed by Lewis Gilbert (Alfie, Educating Rita) but the only one to feature a screenplay by author Roald Dahl (best known, of course, for writing children's books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but also a former British intelligence officer). Dahl took great liberties with Fleming's book, keeping very little save for the title and a few locations.
Twice was also thought at the time to mark Connery's final appearance as Bond. A different actor (George Lazenby) did indeed star as 007 in the following film, but Connery would return to play Bond two more times in each of the next two decades.
“Among the weakest of the early Bond films, although Connery is in peak form.” —James Berardinelli, ReelViews
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