The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
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Critics Consensus: The second James Bond film, From Russia with Love is a razor-sharp, briskly-paced Cold War thriller that features several electrifying action scenes.
Critic Consensus: The second James Bond film, From Russia with Love is a razor-sharp, briskly-paced Cold War thriller that features several electrifying action scenes.
All Critics (56) | Top Critics (7) | Fresh (54) | Rotten (2) | DVD (11)
The film lacks the exotic, colourful flamboyance of the best of its successors. So shoot me.
FRWL has character and dash, and even something of a conventional plot, all worth revisiting for this pin-sharp restoration.
Sophisticated? Well, not really. But fast, smart, shrewdly directed and capably performed.
From Russia with Love is a preposterous, skillful slab of hardhitting, sexy hokum.
For my money, still the best Bond, with a screwball plotline that keeps the locales changing and the surprises coming.
007 is very much with us again, and anyone who hasn't yet got to know him is urged to do so right away!
It has a few sillier moments, but in general it's quite the tense cold war spy film, with some good foreshadowing and a few really good action set pieces.
From Russia With Love perfectly threads the needle between art and commerce, showing us everything that's allowed the series to keep on keeping on.
The pace fast and furious and the invention, I suppose, inventive in the sense that a new nonsense always follows hard on the heels of an old nonsense and blow follows blow in crunching virtuosity of method.
Cliff-hanging, 1964: that's From Russia with Love. That is, you get a complete serial every five minutes, often with a new babe or two falling for James Bond's masculine charms.
The series' tightest expression of brutes playacting as gentlemen
The success of Dr. No has no doubt given the James Bond team added confidence, if that was necessary, and From Russia with Love is made by people who clearly know that they now have a gilt-edged formula to play with.
Manages to build upon the strengths of it's predecessor (Dr. No) while also laying down the seeds of the classic "Bond formula" (Opening theme song, mission briefs from M, gadgets, Bond girls). Connery continues to kill it as James Bond in this excellent Cold War-thriller that almost approaches the level of Hitchcock at times, especially in Bond's confrontation with Red Grant. Speaking of Red Grant, the villains are also better this time around. Both Robert Shaw and Lotte Lenya turn in excellent and memorable performances. If I had to pick a drawback, it's that I found Tatiana to be a pretty dull character and didn't showcase much personality outside of being eye-candy.
Super Reviewer
This film has everything that was great about the first bond film, and more. The plot is wiser, the characters have more to do, the action is much more developed, and the character-to-character dialogue scenes are some of the most intense scenes I have ever seen in a movie. This film does everything to perfection, and what I love so much about these films is how easily each cast member can work with each other. They all feel so comfortable. I have no complaints about this film, besides a few characters that were brought up, but left out until then end of the film, but every movie can be poked at. "From Russia With Love" is a stunning Bond feature!
The best of the lot: the most perfectly realised on the screen and the truest to Fleming. As with Dr. No, the location photography here in the main favours the gritty over the travelogue pretty, a trend the series would regrettably begin to move away from with the very next film, Goldfinger. Terence Young's direction has a sure-footedness and confidence that was entirely lacking in his earlier effort and Robert Shaw's psychopathic SPECTRE agent is still the best henchman to have graced the Bond franchise.
'From Russia with Love's bigger budget provides a slightly grander film than the franchise's first installment, but it still suffers from minor flaws. The film is more quicky paced and with a better plot, but does not have an enticing enough villain to compete with Connery's character. However, a few good action set pieces and a well shot film imply that the franchise is making good strides, and who better to keep in the driver seat than Sean Connery.
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