Following the outstanding Casino Royale, and the dodgy Quantum of Solace, Daniel Craig returns for his third outing as Bond in Skyfall and it is a cracking return to form.

A hard drive of names of undercover Nato agents is stolen in an extremely violent operation in the course of which Bond goes missing, presumed dead. A few months later the disk is decrypted and the names released in batches of 5 to the press, leading to the capture and execution of some of those exposed.

Bond, not dead of course, but losing himself in drink and sex in an unnamed beach paradise, cannot escape his sense of duty and so returns to the battle to help retrieve the lost hard drive from the shadowy grouping that has taken it.

Daniel Craig and Judi Dench are, of course, superb as Bond and M respectively. But the director Sam Mendes has enticed some of the best European actors alive to join the cast with Ralph Fiennes a smooth intelligence bureaucrat, Ben Whishaw utterly brilliant as the new Q, the stunning Naomie Harris as a superbly self-confident young field agent Eve, and the great Javier Bardem gloriously over-the-top as the villian. In a relatively small part Berenice Marlohe is outstanding, I thought, at portraying with the occasional flicker of her eyes or the tremor of a hand, the terror of a woman enslaved, literally, in a situation from which she can conceive of no escape.

One detail that seems to have escaped most reviewers is that Mendes, seems to have made Bond a Catholic: the later scenes in Bond's Scottish home are replete with suggestions and symbolism of covert Catholicism, including a priest-hole. Perhaps this was unintentional. But perhaps Mendes has plans for more personal inner conflict and tortured conscience in a mooted follow up. If Skyfall is anything to go by that would certainly be something to look forward to.