What's in a name? Lately, less and less. With Daniel Craig's third go at 007, I'm not sure there's much left that distinguishes Bond from Bourne from Batman. They're all slurping from the same soup – think: death-haunted, self-righteous, tight-lipped and -quipped, parkour enthusiast.

Kimberley Jones

Austin Chronicle

Skyfall has the feel of both a ceremonial commemoration and a franchise-rebooting celebration, especially in the ways it attempts to too cutely sync up the '60s-era Bond mythos (casual misogyny and all) with the more complicatedly Bourne-inflected recent episodes.

It's an unusually funny, literate, worked-out script, and Mendes seems hell-bent on making the best Bond since Goldfinger - or the best, period, given that he exhumes Bond's old Aston Martin only to shoot it cheekily to pieces.

David Edelstein

New York Magazine (Vulture)