Skyfall: Critic Reviews

Skyfall represents the new standard in one of cinema's longest running franchises. It is a deeply personal, exquisitely shot film that had me mesmerized from the opening scene.

Conveys the melancholy of loss, mortality, and future-shock anxiety, while at the same time leaving us plenty of space to enjoy one of the most complexly unhinged villains in Bond history.

Whether Mr. Mendes is deploying an explosion or a delectable detail, he retains a crucially human scale and intimacy, largely by foregrounding the performers.

From the opening in Istanbul to the final siege shootout in the Scottish Highlands, this film is a supremely enjoyable and even sentimental spectacle, giving us an attractively human (though never humane) Bond.

Works terrifically well up to a point.

What a difference 50 years makes. It might sound blasphemous, but in Skyfall Daniel Craig has it all over previous 007s.

From the first smoky notes of a theme song sung by Adele, it's clear that "Skyfall" will be both classic and of-the-moment.

These are truly tedious stakes for an action movie. The franchise isn't worried about world safety. It's fretting over whether to start wearing Depends.

Skyfall's fatal misstep is its slavish hewing to event-movie trends.

Though a notch below "Royale," "Skyfall" follows that reboot's lead, making a now 50-year-old icon as cool as when he began.

The movie's smartest suit is emotional intelligence: Skyfall keeps us caring, intensely, for a hero who, by any rational measure, is a vestige of a vanished era.

The movie makes a claim that can't be matched by many Bond films: It's actually about something.

Craig has settled into a well-suited, grim-reaper role. Even when James flirts and trysts, his creased face suggests an unmovable weight.

'Quantum of Solace,' was a dour, dire letdown. This picture's a substantial bounce back, and easily the best Craig Bond picture. Emotional depth and all.

This is the movie in which the newest Bond finally eases into the part of the bon vivant for-Queen-and-Country horndog who likes his martinis shaken and not stirred.

The director, Sam Mendes, has taken a pop concept and solemnized it with Freud, which is not, perhaps, the best way of turning Bond into grownup entertainment.

This is a full-blooded, joyous, intelligent celebration of a beloved cultural icon, with Daniel Craig taking full possession of a role he previously played unconvincingly.

Casino Royale remains the best of the recent Bonds, with Skyfall just a notch below it.

The James Bond franchise turns 50 with a stellar entry that fires on all cylinders as an action picture but also casts a modest glance backward to its illustrious past.

Skyfall is certainly the most cultured Bond film to come along in some time. It's also the first of the three Craig endeavors to seriously (and wittily) acknowledge its pedigree.

Some of it is terrific. And some of it is spectacular.

Great heroes are often enhanced by the villains they face, and such is the situation here. To really work, Bond needs great bad guys. Silva is bad at its best.

While "Skyfall" obviously has a great fondness for the past, it's not trapped there. It also anticipates Bond's future. In this immensely satisfying movie, so do we.

Bond is back, and so is high-octane entertainment.

Putting the "intelligence" in MI6, Skyfall reps a smart, savvy and incredibly satisfying addition to the 007 oeuvre.