ANDREW KLAVAN: Why ‘Spectre’ Gets a B: “The people who make these movies live in a haze of such intellectual dishonesty that they have forgotten, or chosen to ignore, these answers. They aren’t honest so they can’t write honest plots. Their villains have no motives and their master plans are confusing where they’re not just laughable. Their heroes are merely an assemblage of characteristics from an earlier age: empty images that move and talk a certain way but have no virtue and so no power to thrill. They are, so to speak, merely spectres of their former selves. Without intellectual honesty, you can’t find moral truth. Without moral truth, there are no good stories.”

I remember watching the Craig version of Casino Royale and contemplating the disparity between that film’s characters and those who inhabited the Connery-era Bonds, and as much as I wanted the film to work, feeling very little empathy for either Craig’s 007, or anyone surrounding him, unlike those swank early Bonds. (However flabby the Bond films themselves that Pierce Brosnan starred in became, Brosnan himself seemed to bring together a bit of Connery’s spine with a fair dollop of Moore’s gregariousness and charm, along with plenty of goodwill from the Remington Steele days.) Perhaps’ Andrew’s take on the disconnect between today’s 007 writers and Ian Fleming’s WWII-era morality explain the distance I felt as well.