Timothy Dalton's second and last shot at playing James Bond isn't nearly as much fun as his debut, two years earlier, in the 1987 The Living Daylights. This time Bond gets mad after a close friend (David Hedison) from the intelligence sector is assassinated on his wedding day, and 007 goes undercover to link the murder to an international drug cartel. Robert Davi makes an interesting adversary, but as with most of the Bond films in the '70s, '80s, and '90s—and especially since the end of the cold war—one has to wonder why we should still care about these lesser villains and their unimaginative crimes. Still, Dalton did manage in his short time with the character to make 007 his own, which neither Roger Moore did nor Pierce Brosnan did. —Tom Keogh

Timothy Dalton made his 007 debut in the lean, mean mode of Sean Connery, doing away with the pun-filled camp of Roger Moore's final outings. He establishes his persona right from the gritty pre-credits sequence, in which he hangs from a speeding truck as it barrels down narrow cobblestone streets, battles an assassin mano a mano, and lands in the arms of a bikinied babe. This James Bond is ruthless, tough, and romantic. The Living Daylights, set during the thaw of the cold war, begins with the defection of Russian KGB General Koskov (Jeroen Krabbé) and his revelation of a Soviet plot to eliminate Britain's secret agent force. Assigned to eliminate Koskov's Soviet boss (John Rhys-Davies, cutting a memorable figure in his brief appearance), Bond uncovers a conspiracy involving Koskov and an American arms dealer (Joe Don Baker). Maryam d'Abo makes a fine Bond girl as Koskov's beautiful cellist girlfriend, a classy innocent who soon loses her naive blush and shows her pluck. The villains are lackluster—Krabbé is a clown and Baker a blowhard—and Dalton hadn't yet mastered the delivery of the trademark quips, but it's a sleek script with a no-nonsense attitude. Veteran series director John Glen's action scenes have never been better—especially the show-stopping mid-air battle on the net of a speeding cargo plane—and he returns the series to the smart, rough, high-energy adventures that made the Bond reputation. —Sean Axmaker

Roger Moore's last outing as James Bond is evidence enough that it was time to pass the torch to another actor. Beset by crummy action (an out-of-control fire engine?) and featuring a fading Moore still trying to prop up his mannered idea of style, the film is largely interesting for Christopher Walken's quirky performance as a sort-of supervillain who wants to take out California's Silicon Valley. Grace Jones has a spookily interesting presence as a lethal associate of Walken's (and who, in the best Bond tradition, has sex with 007 before trying to kill him later), and Patrick Macnee (Steed!) has a warm if brief bit. Even directed by John Glen, who brought some crackle to the Moore years in the Bond franchise, this is a very slight effort. —Tom Keogh

After years of enduring Roger Moore in the role of James Bond, it was good to have Sean Connery back in this 1983 film for a one-time-only trip down 007's memory lane. Connery's Bond, a bit of a dinosaur in the British secret service at (then) 52, is still in demand during times of crisis. Sadly, the film is not very good. In this rehash of Thunderball, Bond is pitted against a worthy underwater villain (Klaus Maria Brandauer); and while the requisite Bond Girls include beauties Kim Basinger and Barbara Carrera, they can't save the movie. The script has several truly dumb passages, among them a (gasp) video-game duel between 007 and his nemesis that now looks utterly anachronistic. For Connery fans, however, this widescreen print of the Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back) film is a chance to say a final goodbye to a perfect marriage of actor and character. —Tom Keogh

Sean Connery casts a long shadow over the James Bond legacy. He created the movie persona and starred in six of the first seven features, all but establishing the cool cold warrior as the world's most suave secret agent. The six titles in MGM's third collection celebrate the Connery Bond with three of his classics, including From Russia with Love, 007's second and perhaps finest outing. A blond, buff Robert Shaw plays Bond's most ruthless nemesis, and Lotte Lenya and the great Pedro Armindáriz costar in this sleek, high-energy trip through the Iron Curtain. Connery travels to the Far East in You Only Live Twice, which introduces the international criminal conspiracy SPECTRE and its cat-loving mastermind, Blofeld (Donald Pleasence). After a brief retirement, Connery returned for Diamonds Are Forever, his final "official" appearance in the Bond series (15 years later he played Bond for a rival studio's Never Say Never Again). This more tongue-in-cheek adventure takes 007 to Las Vegas, where he battles Blofeld (this time played by Charles Gray) and his minions—namely, a pair of fey, sardonic henchmen and a team of bikini-clad karate killers.

Octopussy, a colorful cold war thriller and one of Roger Moore's better Bond outings, stars Louis Jourdan as a corrupt Afghan prince and Maud Adams (making her second Bond appearance) as the ringmaster of an all-babe traveling circus team that unknowingly carries a nuclear bomb. Christopher Walken hams it up under a platinum-blond hairdo while his Amazon bodyguard, Grace Jones, growls through A View to a Kill, a silly but often visually impressive adventure that made it obvious Moore was too old and stiff to carry on the Bond legacy. The torch was passed to Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights, an attempt to clear away the camp elements of Moore's portrayal and return to a lean, hard-edged spy thriller for the post-cold war era. It lacks the larger-than-life characters and spectacle of previous Bond pictures, but Dalton was a tough, ruthless 007 and a worthy inheritor of the legacy, which was then passed on to Pierce Brosnan.

The DVD editions of the films each feature audio commentary by the director and key members of the crew, "making of" documentaries, and a host of stills, TV spots, trailers, and other supplements. —Sean Axmaker

Roger Moore was nearing the end of his reign as James Bond when he made Octopussy, and he looks a little worn out. But the movie itself infuses some new blood into the old franchise, with a frisky pace and a pair of sturdy villains. Maud Adams—who'd also been in the Bond outing The Man with the Golden Gun—plays the improbably named Octopussy, while old smoothie Louis Jourdan is her crafty partner in crime. There's an island populated only by women, plus a fantastic sequence with a hand-to-hand fight that happens on a plane—and on top of a plane. The film even has an extra emotional punch, since this time out 007 is not only following the orders of Her Majesty's Secret Service, but he is also exacting a personal revenge: a fellow double-0 agent has been killed. Two Bond films were actually released in 1983 within a few months of each other, as Octopussy was followed by Sean Connery's comeback in Never Say Never Again. The success of both pictures proved that there was still plenty of mileage left in the old license to kill, though Moore had one more workout—A View to a Kill—before hanging it up. And that title? The franchise had already used up the titles to Ian Fleming's novels, so Octopussy was taken from a lesser-known Fleming short story. —Robert Horton

After the lavish, effects-heavy splash of Moonraker, the twelfth Bond film and the seventh with Roger Moore concentrates more on core car-chase-and-crumpet values, evoking an almost retro feel that harks back to the first pressings of the Bond vintage in the 1960s. Starting to look a little wrinkly around the edges by this point, Roger Moore toughens his usually smarmy act up here with a gratuitous bit of killing, casually kicking a baddie and his car over a precipice, reviving memories of the ruthless streak with which Sean Connery made his name. Good old-fashioned Cold War politics lie at the heart of the plot, concerning a weapons system hijacked in the Mediterranean Bond must rescue. He's assisted by the exquisite Carole Bouquet, the only actress in history who can claim to have been both a 'Bond girl' and the star of a Luis Buñuel movie (That Obscure Object of Desire). Sadly, this is the first film to lack Bernard Lee's spymaster M, the actor having died beforehand, although British comedienne Janet Brown is on hand for an amusing Margaret Thatcher impersonation. —Leslie Felperin

On the DVD: The first audio commentary here is another one of those edited selections of interviews with sundry cast and crew members, tied together by an over-earnest host. Producer Michael G Wilson and others provide a somewhat more illuminating second commentary track. Once again the best extra feature is the "making of" documentary, which gives an almost scene-by-scene breakdown of the movie. The animated storyboard sequences will appeal to filmmaking aficionados. Avoid, if at all possible, the Sheena Easton video of arguably the most forgettable Bond song of all time (both song and score were perpetrated by series newcomer Bill Conti, not the estimable John Barry). —Mark Walker

This was the first James Bond adventure produced after the success of Star Wars, so it jumped on the sci-fi bandwagon by combining the suave appeal of Agent 007 (once again played by Roger Moore) with enough high-tech hardware and special effects to make Luke Skywalker want to join Her Majesty's Secret Service. After the razzle-dazzle of The Spy Who Loved Me, this attempt to latch onto a trend proved to be a case of overkill, even though it brought back the steel-toothed villain Jaws (Richard Kiel) and scored a major hit at the box office. This time Bond is up against a criminal industrialist named Drax (Michel Lonsdale) who wants to control the world from his orbiting space station. In keeping with his well-groomed style, Bond thwarts this maniacal Neo-Hitler's scheme with the help of a beautiful, sleek-figured scientist (played by Lois Chiles with all the vitality of a department-store mannequin). There's a grand-scale climax involving space shuttles and ray guns, but despite the film's popular success, this is one Bond adventure that never quite gets off the launching pad. It's as if the caretakers of the James Bond franchise had forgotten that it's Bond—and not a barrage of gizmos and gadgets (including a land-worthy Venetian gondola)—that fuels the series' success. Despite Moore's passive performance (which Pauline Kael described as "like an office manager who is turning into dead wood but hanging on to collect his pension"), Moonraker had no problem attracting an appreciative audience, and there are even a few renegade Bond-philes who consider it one of their favorites. —Jeff Shannon

The best of the James Bond adventures starring Roger Moore as tuxedoed Agent 007, this globe-trotting thriller introduced the steel-toothed Jaws (played by seven-foot-two-inch-tall actor Richard Kiel) as one of the most memorable and indestructible Bond villains. Jaws is so tenacious that Moore looks genuinely frightened, which adds to the abundant fun. This time Bond teams up with yet another lovely Russian agent (Barbara Bach) to track a pair of nuclear submarines that the nefarious Stromberg (Curt Jürgens) plans to use in his plot to start World War III. Featuring lavish sets designed by the great Ken Adam (Dr. Strangelove), The Spy Who Loved Me is a galaxy away from the suave Sean Connery exploits of the 1960s, but the film works perfectly as grandiose entertainment. From cavernous undersea lairs to the vast horizons of Egypt, this Bond thriller keeps its tongue firmly in its cheek with a plot tailor-made for daredevil escapism. —Jeff Shannon

The British superspy with a license to kill takes on his dark underworld double, a classy assassin who kills with golden bullets at $1 million a hit. Roger Moore, in his second outing as James Bond, meets Christopher Lee's Scaramanga, one of the most magnetic villains in the entire series, in this entertaining but rather wan entry in the 007 sweepstakes. Bond's globetrotting search takes him to Hong Kong, Bangkok, and finally China, where Scaramanga turns his island retreat into a twisted theme park for a deadly game of wits between the gunmen, moderated by Scaramanga's diminutive man Friday Nick Nack (Fantasy Island's Hervé Villechaize). Britt Ekland does her best as the most embarrassingly inept Bond girl in 007 history, a clumsy, dim agent named Mary Goodnight who looks fetching in a bikini, while Maud Adams is Scaramanga's tough but haunted lover and assistant (she returns to the series as the title character in Octopussy). Clifton James, the redneck sheriff from Live and Let Die, makes an embarrassing and ill-advised appearance as a racist tourist who briefly teams up with 007 in what is otherwise the film's highlight, a high-energy chase through the crowded streets of Bangkok that climaxes with a breathtaking midair corkscrew jump. Bond and company are let down by a lazy script, but Moore balances the overplayed humor with a steely performance and Lee's charm and enthusiasm makes Scaramanga a cool, deadly, and thoroughly enchanting adversary. —Sean Axmaker

Roger Moore was introduced as James Bond in this 1973 action movie featuring secret agent 007. More self-consciously suave and formal than predecessor Sean Connery, he immediately reestablished Bond as an uncomplicated and wooden fellow for the feel-good '70s. This film also marks a deviation from the more character-driven stories of the Connery years, a deliberate shift to plastic action (multiple chases, bravura stunts) that made the franchise more of a comic book or machine. If that's not depressing enough, there's even a good British director on board, Guy Hamilton (Force 10 from Navarone). The story finds Bond taking on an international drug dealer (Yaphet Kotto), and while that may be superficially relevant, it isn't exactly the same as fighting supervillains on the order of Goldfinger. —Tom Keogh

The second grab bag of 007 adventures features three Bonds in five films, including the legendary movie that started it all. In 1962 Sean Connery defined the cinematic James Bond as a tough, charming, and thoroughly professional cold war spy with a license to kill in the lean, hard-edged Dr. No. With Ursula Andress (as the original Bond girl Honey Ryder, who makes her entrance in a bikini), Bond battles a renegade supervillain with little more than his wits, his cunning, and his Walther PPK (this was before Q armed him with the coolest toys a superspy ever had). George Lazenby, a handsome Australian model with a self-effacing confidence, made his first and only appearance as James Bond in the underrated On Her Majesty's Secret Service, a witty and action-packed adventure that makes 007 history when Bond marries the girl (the lovely and talented Diana Rigg, fresh from her duties as the butt-kicking spy on the TV series The Avengers). Roger Moore brought a light tone and a suave assurance to the series as the third Bond, and the set features three of his seven appearances. In The Man with the Golden Gun, he battles million-dollar assassin Christopher Lee, one of Bond's most magnetic adversaries. The Spy Who Loved Me, perhaps Moore's finest hour, is a return to the extravagant set pieces and cold war thrills of Connery's pictures and introduces Richard Kiel's steel-dentured Jaws to the series. Jaws returns as a comic figure in Moonraker, a misguided sci-fi entry that takes Bond to space for a physically impressive but dramatically lackluster adventure. More of a mixed bag than the initial seven-film James Bond Gift Set, this set is aimed at the Bond completist rather than the general fan. The DVD editions of the films each feature audio commentary by the director and key members of the crew, "making of" documentaries, and a host of stills, TV spots, and trailers. —Sean Axmaker

Sean Connery retired from the 007 franchise after You Only Live Twice (replaced by George Lazenby in the underrated and underperforming On Her Majesty's Secret Service) but was lured back for one last official appearance as James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever. He's in fine form—cool but ruthless—in a sharp precredits sequence hunting the unkillable Blofeld (a suavely menacing Charles Gray in this incarnation), but the MacGuffin of a story (involving diamond smuggling, a superlaser on a satellite, and Blofeld's latest plot to rule the world ) is full of the groaning tongue-in-cheek gags that Roger Moore would make his signature. Goldfinger director Guy Hamilton keeps the film zipping along gamely from one entertaining set piece to another, including a terrific car chase in a parking lot, a battle with a pair of bikini-clad killer gymnasts named Bambi and Thumper, and a deadly game with a bizarre pair of fey, sardonic killers who dispatch their victims with elaborate invention. Jill St. John is the brassy but not too bright American smuggler Tiffany Case, and country singer and pork sausage king Jimmy Dean costars as a reclusive billionaire with not-so-subtle parallels to Howard Hughes. Shirley Bassey belts out the memorable theme song, one of the series' best. Connery retired again after this one but he returned once more, for Never Say Never Again 15 years later for a rival production company. —Sean Axmaker

Australian model George Lazenby took up the mantle of the world's most suave secret agent when Sean Connery retired as James Bond—prematurely, it turned out. Connery returned in Diamonds Are Forever before leaving the role to Roger Moore and Lazenby's subsequent career fizzled, yet this one-hit wonder is responsible for one of the best Bond films of all time.

In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, 007 leaves the Service to privately pursue his SPECTRE nemesis Blofeld (played this time by Telly Savalas), whose latest master plan involves a threat to the world's crops by agricultural sterilization. Bond teams up with suave international crime lord Draco (Gabriele Ferzetti) and falls in love with—and marries—his elegant daughter, Tracy (Diana Rigg). Bond goes monogamous? Not at first; after all he has Blofeld's harem to seduce. Lazenby hasn't the intensity of Connery but he has fun with his quips and even lampoons the Bond image in a playful pre-credits sequence, and Rigg, fresh from playing sexy Emma Peel in The Avengers, matches 007 in every way. Former editor Peter Hunt makes a strong directorial debut, deftly handling the elaborate action sequences—including a car chase turned road rally through the icy snow—with a kinetic finesse and a dash of humor. Though not a hit on its original release, On Her Majesty's Secret Service has become a fan favorite and the closest the series has come to capturing the spirit of Ian Fleming's books. —Sean Axmaker