Skyfall Is Bond at His Best

Daniel Craig's return as James Bond is a triumphant one. Skyfall, directed by Sam Mendes, contains plenty of the action-packed elements we've come to expect from 007—but also has some serious heart, critics say:

• "The latest addition to the Bond canon goes beyond thrilling into chilling and enthralling, plus a kind of stirring that has nothing to do with martinis," writes Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal. "We need 007, even after half a century of his ups and downs in various incarnations, to remind us how deeply pleasurable an action thriller can be."

• Writing in Slate, Dana Stevens says Bond travels to "deeper and darker places than he’s visited in a long while, maybe ever," in an "unexpectedly somber, even elegiac film."It’s the portrait of a spy at the end of his rope by an actor who seems close to his."
• It sure beats Casino Royale, writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. This film "gets Bond just right" as it "grasps the spy's existential center ... There's brutal death here, but there’s also a pervading sense of mortality that makes the falling bodies register a little longer than they sometimes do in a Bond movie."
• "This is Bond like you've never seen him, almost Freudian in his vulnerability. And a dynamite Daniel Craig, never better in the role, nails Bond's ferocity and feeling," writes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. Mendes and Co. "use England itself—past, present, and uncertain future—to remind us where Bond has been and where he's going. You'll want to be there. Skyfall is smashing, just smashing."

(More James Bond stories.)