Honestly, I've only seen the Brosnan and Craig movies so I can only compare those joints.
They are both good in the part. Craig is clearly a more modern take. Make no mistake, his Bond can still be sensitive and suave, but he clearly has a more current Walter White/anti-hero type of thing going on in comparison to Brosnan. On the same token, Brosnan could be vicious, but he also was slightly more suave, and he also used those classic one-liners a bit more.
Goldeneye is the only Brosnan movie that gets any respect. There is still a lot of that pre-Craig silliness in it to be honest, and it's hard to rate it over something that feels so grounded like Casino Royale. But it's an extremely competent action movie with some very memorable characters (The Russian mobster guy, Jean Grey, the geeky computer nerd, Trevelyan) and set-pieces (the opening, the tank chase, antenna scene at the end). And my understanding is that it low-key saved the franchise, so there's that. I personally think that
Tomorrow Never Dies is *slightly* underrated but most don't feel that way.
The World Is Not Enough is horrible and I've not got much to say about it. Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist, played mostly straight?
Die Another Day had a bizarre plot with Asian cats turning themselves into white bois and invisible cars and ice cities and all that nonsense. Trying to use Bond to create a Halle Berry Jinx spin-off....
The Craig movies are better, but dare I say, he's still only batting 2/4.
Casino Royale is the only film that I would rate as a legitimately great movie irregardless of genre or franchise. That relationship between Bond and Vesper was genuinely romantic and made you want to root for them. Which of course made the end gut-wrenching. I think that the card scenes are perfect. THAT'S how you create suspense in your action movie without relying on a gun-fight or car chase or set-piece. I really didn't care for Quantum Of Solace. I've heard it said that people would have liked it as a non-Bond film, but that placing the Bond veneer over that story didn't work. I kind of disagree. It was messy. Skyfall was a return to form, extremely retrospective, and had a memorable villain. My only issue was the pacing. The final third of the movie at his old home was well done, but there was no way to transition to that without it being jarring. I thought that Spectre was a huge misstep. It seems like they were blatantly trying to make a nostalgia based Bond, using all of the bells and whistles from the old films (That, to be fair, I've never seen, but understand through osmosis).
Out of the ones I've seen, Eva Green is definitely the best Bond girl. Natayla second. Olga Kurylenko 3rd (I didn't like her movie, but she was class).
Best villain : Sean Bean and Javier Bardem are super close and it's hard to get any distance between them...I think that they both play great foils to Bond while commenting on what it means/meant to be a 00.
Craig deserves one more, but I'd happily support another take after this 5th one. Not because of him, but because I just think one should only play the character for so long...
First act is setting up something interesting and an actual spy story. Once he gets out of Korea, shyt is downhill