This month, Daniel Craig earned the best reviews of his career for Luca Guadagnino’s acclaimed drama Queer. But the veteran English actor has always had an interesting career, from his early roles in The Power of One and Tales from the Crypt to his more recent films like the Knives Out mysteries.
A reconsideration of his filmography is, therefore, expected and warranted — not dismissing his revolutionary 15 years as James Bond but putting them in the context of the variegated career out of which they sprang. So prep those martinis (shaken or stirred) and sharpen those knives as here are the 10 best Daniel Craig films.
10. Quantum of Solace (2008)
Regarded as a disappointment at the time of its release, Quantum of Solace, Craig’s second outing as James Bond, is easily the third-strongest of his Bond pictures.
There’s a distinct, hazy visual style thanks to director Marc Forster (the youngest helmer in the franchise’s history), a killer spycrafty set piece at an ultra-modern opera house, and the always-excellent Gemma Arterton as a secondary Bond girl named, in the classic tradition of the franchise, Strawberry Fields. Her murder by being covered in crude oil (sure, why not?) brings to mind a parallel sequence from Goldfinger (1964), another of the film’s nods to Bonds past.
9. Road to Perdition (2002)
Craig and Tom Hanks both play against type — Hanks as an as amoral Chicago mobster, Craig as his boss’s ne’er-do-well son — in Sam Mendes’s adaptation of the 1998 graphic novel Road to Perdition. With its stark blacks and whites and eerie static shots, it anticipates Zack Snyder’s more self-consciously comic-book-adjacent films of the middle 2000s.
This one is of interest as a necessary precursor to Mendes and Craig’s later collaborations on Skyfall and Spectre, as Paul Newman’s last on-screen role, and as a showcase for Craig in his early days as a character actor/heavy. Craig, as Connor, a mobster’s son no one has any particular interest in keeping alive, makes use of the highly questionable American accent he’d later supplant with his Benoit Blanc Foghorn Leghorn drawl.
8. Logan Lucky (2017)
In the sixth of Stephen Soderbergh’s (thus far) seven heist movies (the guy just loves heists!), the thickheaded robbers are yokel brothers Jimmy (Channing Tatum) and Clyde Logan (Adam Driver), the target is the Charlotte Motor Speedway, and Craig is the demolitions expert who blows a hole in its vault.
The film, Soderbergh’s first since his short-lived “retirement” in 2012, may ultimately have a bit too much on its mind. But it’s still a candy-colored carousel of outrageous cameos and Bible Belt-isms, a working-class Ocean’s Eleven (or, as it’s winkingly referred to in the film, “Ocean’s Seven-Eleven”).
7. The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
An utterly bizarre relic of early 2010s culture, The Adventures of Tintin was meant to be the first in a long-running animated franchise co-spearheaded by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. That no sequel has since appeared is perhaps thanks to its conspicuous use of the now-archaic motion-capture technology pioneered by Robert Zemeckis in the early 2000s, or Spielberg’s schedule, or Jackson’s (utterly superfluous Hobbit sequels won’t make themselves).
But it’s not for lack of charm on the part of this light-stepping lark of an adventure pic, nor for lack of a memorable villain, as Craig plays the malevolent treasure hunter Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine, surely the only man in history thus named with a British accent.
6. Skyfall (2012)
Is it, as has been suggested, the best Bond movie ever? Absolutely not — it’s not even Craig’s best Bond film ever (see below). But Skyfall is an action extravaganza that also manages to be a reckoning with mortality and its own franchise’s mythos, a subtle retelling of The Odyssey, and the mantelpiece for what is unequivocally the best Bond theme ever. (Adele’s Skyfall tune is so good that it managed through pure residual staying power to win Oscars not just for itself but also for Sam Smith’s and Billie Eilish’s textureless and odorless themes for the next two Bond films.)
5. Layer Cake (2004)
The directorial debut of future Kingsman doyenne Matthew Vaughn, Layer Cake is a conscious throwback to an all-too-brief era of British crime films that was already over by the time of its release. (I’m referring to dialectically incomprehensible bits of scenery-chewing and gunplay like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and Sexy Beast, the former two also produced by Vaughn.)
Craig’s a gangster and drug dealer, name never revealed, who makes his way through an ensemble of British heavy hitters including but not limited to Michael Gambon, Ben Whishaw, Tom Hardy (eons before Venom: The Last Dance), Sally Hawkins, and Sienna Miller — Miller at her best in the femme fatale/damsel in distress blend she’d come to perfect. Often credited as the deciding factor in Craig’s Bond casting, this fleet crime drama is a delectable mishmash of high and low, the alleyway and the country club.
4. Munich (2005)
Craig came to Steven Spielberg’s Tintin through this earlier collaboration, the story of a Mossad-sponsored team of freelancers hunting down those responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Munich ranks high among Spielberg’s historical dramas thanks to its star-studded (if dubiously Jewish) team of Craig, Eric Bana, Ciarán Hinds, and Geoffrey Rush.
As a South African Jewish driver for the team of agents, Craig embodies the surging moral motivation for the crusade but also the ambiguity in an officially unaffiliated team of killers taking out radicals around the world.
3. Knives Out (2019)
The new film characters strong enough to carry a franchise that have been created in the past decade can be counted on the fingers of one hand — actually, now that I think about it, on one finger.
That honor goes to Benoit Blanc, the consulting detective with the high-camp southern accent and the proclivity for Stephen Sondheim, who debuted in Rian Johnson’s excellent 2019 whodunit Knives Out and was played by — what’s this! — James Bond himself, seeking an escape from a straitjacketing identification with a single character. As Blanc jump-started an ongoing Netflix franchise that looks likely to go on for years, perhaps it was a mixed blessing.
2. Casino Royale (2006)
Bond was, simply, never better, not in the ’60s and not since, than in Craig’s muscular debut in Casino Royale, the latest and perhaps last Bond film to be explicitly adapted from an Ian Fleming novel (of the same name).
Yes, this Bond is grittier, yes, he’s a street brawler with a face that looks as if it’s taken one too many punches, and yes, he’s blond, but Bond himself matters less in these movies than the sumptuous plots and circumstances with which the filmmakers manage to surround him. Casino Royale, set in the world of high-stakes gambling and featuring both an all-time Bond girl (Eva Green) and an all-time baddie (Mads Mikkelsen), gives the character stakes and heart and humanity but never ceases to be pure red-meat fun.
1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
Miles better than its Swedish-language adaptation from 2009, director David Fincher’s take on the 2005 Swedish mystery novel by Stieg Larsson is as maneuverable and sinuous as its protagonist, hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara). Craig’s crusading journalist is manifestly in over his head in this story of serial murders linked by eerie familial connections.
But Craig himself is magisterially brooding and plays off Mara with aplomb. That the film never spawned the franchise it deserved itself can likely be blamed on Bond. But then, so can everything.
