Sherwood Week: He's not the Marian kind

ROBIN AND MARIAN

1976

Directed by Richard Lester

Written by James Goldman

Spoilers: moderate shifting pretty immediately into severe, and I guess you could feel deceived that I said it was ever "moderate"

00 Week: The truth of the matter, Bond decided over coffee, was that he felt homesick for his real identity. He shrugged.

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

1971

Directed by Guy Hamilton

Written by Richard Maibaum and Tom Mankiewicz

Spoilers: severe

00 Week: Whatever happened, he would put up no resistance to his old skin being sloughed off him on the other side of the world

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE

1967

Directed by Lewis Gilbert

Written by Roald Dahl and Harold Jack Bloom (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)

Spoilers: severe

00 Week: Planes with atom bombs don't get stolen in real life. Except that they do. You're slowing down, James... Don't give me that crap about real life. There ain't no such animal.

THUNDERBALL

1965

Directed by Terence Young

Written by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, Ian Fleming, Richard Maibaum, and John Hopkins

Spoilers: severe

00 Week: Now you're talking. What are we going to do? Rob the end of a rainbow?

GOLDFINGER

1964

Directed by Guy Hamilton

Written by Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)

Spoilers: severe

00 Week: In his particular line of business, peace had reigned for nearly a year. And peace was killing him.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

1963 UK/1964 USA

Directed by Terence Young

Written by Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood, and Berkeley Mather (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)

Spoilers: severe

00 Week: Spelled like Yes?

DR. NO

1962

Directed by Terence Young

Written by Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood, and Berkeley Mather (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)

Spoilers: severe

Note: runs a bit longer than I'd have preferred, mostly thanks to the inefficiencies of getting a retrospective of a film series of this magnitude started

What a disaster: What comes after "Cenozoic"?

METEOR

1979

Directed by Ronald Neame

Written by Stanley Mann and Edmund H. North

Spoilers: moderate

Steven Spielberg, part XVI: And this time he's bringing his dad

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE

With our director returning to his most popular franchise, we arrive at what is—in many important respects—the least of Indiana Jones' original trilogy, and the one that undeniably breaks from the tone and tenor of its two predecessors.  Yet somehow The Last Crusade makes a solid claim to operating on the same rarefied level, albeit in a very different way.  It claws its way back to the pinnacle by being the most personal to its maker—not to mention the most human in its achievement.  Yes, this is the Indy film that makes everybody cry.  Or maybe it just makes me cry—but I really hope it's everybody, just so I don't feel as ashamed as I probably ought to be.

1989

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Written by Jeffrey Boam, Menno Meyjes, Tom Stoppard, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg

With Harrison Ford and River Phoenix (Dr. Henry "Indiana" Jones, Jr.), Sean Connery (Dr. Henry Jones, Sr.), Denholm Elliott (Dr. Marcus Brody), Richard Young (The Man With the Fedora), John Rhys-Davies (Sallah), Kevork Malikyan (Kazim), Robert Eddison (The Knight of the Grail), Michael Byrne (SS-Standartenfuhrer Ernst Vogel), Alison Doody (Dr. Elsa Schneider), and Julian Glover (Walter Donovan)

Spoiler alert: and for this one, you've seen it around sixty times, maybe seventy

To protect the property and citizenry of the City of Chicago

THE UNTOUCHABLES

One of the quintessential examples of how the best thing a film can be about is itself, we have one of the 1980s' supreme action-thrillers, brought to your screen by the Master of the Macabre at his most eager-to-please.  Fully in line with the decade's troublesome politics as well as its embrace of the extremes of violence, The Untouchables is (honestly) all the better for it.

1987
Directed by Brian De Palma
Written by David Mamet (suggested by the book by Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley)
With Kevin Costner (Eliot Ness), Sean Connery (Jim Malone), Charles Martin Smith (Oscar Wallace), Andy Garcia (George Stone), Billy Drago (Frank Nitti), and Robert De Niro (Al Capone)

Spoiler alert: moderate