SPECTRE (Sam Mendes 2015)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about SPECTRE (2015) is not that with Sam Mendes’s sprightly directorial style they have found a helmsman as precisely geriatric as this leaden, self-important iteration of the franchise, nor that the atrocious dialogue actually succeeds in making you miss Roger Moore, nor that it spectacularly misrepresents North African rail services so as to set the benchmark for what we should expect from Prime Minister-to-be Jeremy Corbyn’s thankfully renationalised rail service (every carriage first class, with a bar, boutiques and tailors), nor that its title sequence manages to do tentacle hentai as insipidly as it does theme tune, no, the very best thing about SPECTRE is the hidden-in-plain-sight Marcel Proust allusion that is there for no reason other than to remind you of things past, when Bond used to be fun and misogynist rather than just dull and misogynist…