Easily the most enduring and arguably the most iconic film character of all time, Ian Fleming‘s James Bond has dominated spy cinema since his first big-screen appearance in 1962’s Dr. No. Spearheaded by Eon, Albert “Cubby” R. Broccoli and his progeny, the mainline 007 franchise has run for a staggering 25 entries over six decades without ever really dipping in relevance. Fleming’s British operative is one of cinema’s giants, so it’s easy to see why he casts such a heavy shadow across the spy genre at large.
The mainline Bond franchise is the greatest, and by far one of the most consistent series in film history. The worst films in the series, like Spectre or The Man With the Golden Gun, are still pretty decent and highly rewatchable, while the best entries, pictures like Casino Royale, From Russia With Love, and Goldfinger, are timeless cinematic classics. There are scarce few spy movies out there that are definitively better than even these best of the James Bond pictures, but a few exist. The following ranks the only spy movie masterpieces that are truly better than any James Bond picture.
3
‘North by Northwest’ (1959)
Image via Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Alfred Hitchcock‘s greatest crowd-pleaser was released three years before Dr. No, and the influence of North by Northwest is felt all over the earliest Bond pictures, most notably his sophomore outing From Russia With Love. Following the relative critical and commercial failure of the now-re-assessed Vertigo, Hitchcock paired with screenwriter Ernest Lehmann for the ultimate riff on the director’s long-favored “wrong man” story. North by Northwest stars Cary Grant as an ad exec who becomes unwittingly accused and entangled in a conspiracy concerning a secret agent who doesn’t actually exist. Eva Marie Saint and James Mason co-star in what many would consider the most purely entertaining Alfred Hitchcock picture ever made, surely one of the most entertaining and thrilling of all films.
Relentless wit has become one of the defining features of the Bond films, and North by Northwest is one of the funniest movies ever made, despite not even being a comedy. Lehmann’s script is ranked high on virtually every roundup of the best screenplays ever written, weaving thrills, humor, and romance together in the most seamless, balanced and pleasurable blend of all three you will ever watch. This is arguably the blueprint for all modern action films, its impact especially felt across the Mission: Impossible and Jason Bourne franchises, but even traceable to something like Die Hard. At nearly 70 years old, North by Northwest remains astonishingly effective as pure cinematic adrenaline.
2
‘The Conversation’ (1974)
Image via Paramount Pictures
Francis Ford Coppola released one of his greatest masterpieces in the same year as his Oscars-sweeping sequel The Godfather Part II. In The Conversation, Gene Hackman plays an expert wiretapper at a moral crossroads when he may or may not have recorded a murder. There are certainly echoes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up here, and both films are spirtual bretheren of Brian De Palma’s Blow-Out, but The Conversation stands on its own as a disturbingly understated yarn of paranoia released mere months before President Richard Nixon would resign over his part in the Watergate scandal.
The Conversation serves as a remarkable contrast to the Bond brand of spy film, which were steadily becoming more outlandish at the time, reaching a low point with 1974’s The Man With the Golden Gun. Though it’s now considered an essential cut for both Coppola and Hackman, and is also notable for an early appearance from a pre-Star WarsHarrison Ford, The Conversation was criminally underseen at the time of its release, barely eeking out a profit against a small $1.6 million budget. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were staunch supporters of an espionage masterpiece undervalued in its time, highly praising it in the nascence of their TV program. Ebert would add The Conversation to his “Great Movies” anthology, saying of the picture:
“The Conversation” is about paranoia, invasion of privacy, bugging — and also about the bothersome problem of conscience. The Watergate crew seems, for the most part, to have had no notion that what they were doing was objectively wrong. Harry wants to have no notion. But he does, and it destroys him.
Collider Exclusive · James Bond Personality Quiz Which James Bond Actor Are You Most Like? Connery · Moore · Dalton · Brosnan · Lazenby · Craig
Six actors. Six completely different visions of the same man — dangerous, charming, complicated, and almost certainly wearing a very good suit. Only one of them shares your particular way of moving through the world. Eight questions will figure out which Bond you really are.
🏴Connery
😄Moore
🎭Dalton
✨Brosnan
🤵Lazenby
💠Craig
01
How do you carry yourself when you walk into a room? Bond is always the most interesting person in the room. The question is how he makes you feel it.
02
How do you handle a dangerous situation? Every Bond faces it differently. What does your version look like?
03
How do you charm someone you need on your side? Bond always gets what he needs. The method varies considerably.
04
How do you handle your emotions on the job? Every Bond deals with this differently. Most of them not particularly well.
05
How would your colleagues describe your working style? MI6 has opinions about all of its 00s. What are theirs about you?
06
How do you feel about operating within the rules? The licence to kill comes with terms and conditions. Not everyone reads them.
07
What is your relationship with love? Every Bond has a different answer. None of them have found it easy.
08
When the mission is over, how do you want to be remembered? The name is Bond. The rest is entirely up to the man behind it.
The Name Has Been Determined Your Bond Is…
Six actors. One role. Your answers point to the Bond who shares your presence, your method, and your particular way of carrying the weight of being the most dangerous person in the room.
Dr. No — You Only Live Twice · 1962–1967
Sean Connery
You are the original — and you carry that fact without needing to announce it. There is an authority in the way you occupy a room that others spend careers trying to replicate.
You don’t explain yourself, justify yourself, or soften yourself for anyone’s comfort. The confidence is structural, not performed.
Connery’s Bond established everything — the tone, the danger, the cool — because Connery himself had the innate presence to make something that had never existed feel inevitable.
You share that quality: the sense that you were always going to end up exactly here, doing exactly this.
The name is Bond. In your case, it always was.
Live and Let Die — A View to a Kill · 1973–1985
Roger Moore
You understand something that more serious people miss: that wit is its own form of intelligence, and that making people laugh is not a retreat from danger but a way of mastering it.
Moore’s Bond is underrated precisely because the effortlessness looks easy — and effortlessness is the hardest thing to manufacture.
You have the same quality: a lightness that disarms people before they realise how sharp you actually are.
The raised eyebrow, the perfectly timed quip, the refusal to be rattled — these are not affectations. They are a philosophy about how to move through a world that would like to take itself too seriously.
You have never let it.
The Living Daylights · Licence to Kill · 1987–1989
Timothy Dalton
You took the role seriously when everyone wanted you to coast — and that refusal to take the easy version of anything is the most defining thing about you.
Dalton’s Bond has genuine moral weight: he feels the cost of what he does, he has lines he won’t cross, and he is not interested in the version of himself that pretends otherwise.
You share that intensity. You push harder than the situation technically requires, because you have a standard and you hold yourself to it.
He was ahead of his time — the Bond the franchise wasn’t quite ready for yet, arriving exactly when he was meant to.
You know what that feels like.
GoldenEye — Die Another Day · 1995–2002
Pierce Brosnan
You are the complete package — and you know it, which is part of what makes you so effective and occasionally so infuriating to the people around you.
Brosnan arrived at the role looking exactly like Bond was supposed to look, and he delivered on that expectation with a professionalism that made it seem effortless.
You have the same quality: a smooth competence, a charm that operates like a precision instrument, and the ability to make even difficult things look like they weren’t.
His era was the most commercially successful in the franchise’s history. There is a reason for that.
The reason is that some people simply fit their moment perfectly. You are one of those people.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service · 1969
George Lazenby
You stepped into something enormous with less preparation than anyone around you thought was sufficient — and you delivered something genuine anyway, which is the more impressive achievement.
Lazenby’s single outing is, by many measures, one of the finest Bond films ever made — and he is not a small part of why.
You share his quality of raw authenticity: less polished than the alternatives, more honest for it, capable of something real that technique alone can’t produce.
He was underestimated, and then he wasn’t, and then history caught up with him.
You are the kind of person history catches up with. Give it time.
Casino Royale — No Time to Die · 2006–2021
Daniel Craig
You stripped everything back and found what was underneath — and what was underneath was harder, more honest, and more human than anyone expected.
Craig’s Bond is the franchise’s most psychologically complete: a man doing a brutal job, carrying its costs imperfectly, capable of love and loss in ways that can’t be dismissed.
You share that depth. You don’t hide behind the role or the charm or the suit — you let the work show what it actually costs.
He was controversial from the moment he was announced and definitive by the time he was finished. The sceptics became the believers.
That arc — of being underestimated and then undeniable — is one you know intimately.
1
‘Notorious’ (1946)
Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman rest their faces together in ‘Notorious’.Image via RKO
Though North by Northwest is certainly the more ubiquitous Hitchcock spy thriller, the one that pretty much every casual film fan is at least aware of, his darker, more restrained and even more romantic post-war thriller Notorious makes a damn strong case for being the best movie he ever directed. It is surely the best spy movie ever made.Ingrid Bergman gives the best performance of her career as Alicia Huberman, an infamous, hard-partying and tortured daughter of a Nazi who’s wishing to clear her name. Cary Grant gives the most unusual, uncharacteristically shadowy performance of his career as American intelligence operative Devlin, who directs Alicia to spy on a ring of Nazi vestiges in South America, but not before the two fall in love. It’s a complicated, and harrowing connection; Alicia is an alcoholic, and Devlin is cold, emotionally repressed and cruel.
Cary Grant’s character growing a spine at the end of act three, just in the nick of time to rescue a woman who’s been the true hero of the entire movie, is a story beat very much revisited 13 years later in North by Northwest, only on a much grander scale there. In that film, it’s set amidst a marvelous action sequence atop Mount Rushmore. The emotional heft of Notorious is rawer and more powerful in its understatement. There’s no action scene, just a long overdue declaration of love—Notorious genuinely might be the most romantic film ever made, in a way that’s thunderously convincing rather than corny—and a painfully tense descent down a staircase towards physical safety. The big climactic set piece is indeed just a few people walking down a staircase, really slowly, and yet it’s hard to overstate how emotionally gripping it all is thanks to the performances, and Hitchcock’s camera placement that warrants being carefully studied by anyone with any kind of interest in film and filmmaking. Roger Ebert included Notorious on a list of the ten greatest movies ever made. It is that good.
