10 Best Spy Films That AREN'T James Bond

There's a recent school of thought with the Mission: Impossible franchise that it only reached a peak with the arrival of director Christopher McQuarrie, who took the baton from Brad Bird's revitalising Ghost Protocol and went on to deliver series-best entries Rogue Nation, Fallout, and Dead Reckoning. While it is true that McQuarrie has produced seminal work on the series - and may yet reach a new peak with the yet-to-be-released Final Reckoning later this year - it may be just as true to say that everyone is a little too hasty to forget its roots, which were planted in iconic fashion by Brian De Palma in 1996.

In other words, the first Mission: Impossible is a film I think we all take a little for granted. Like The Matrix three years later, Mission: Impossible was immediately absorbed into pop culture iconography and through that has been defined as a movie of set-pieces rather than as a gripping, inventive recalibration of a dormant TV show. Everyone knows the bombastic, orchestral Danny Elfman theme; the bead of sweat that almost gives Ethan Hunt away when he's suspended from a ceiling; and of course the Eurostar finale, which sees Cruise tussling with Jean Reno and Jon Voight at high speeds.

Those set pieces are all wonderful, but their impact has been unjustly diminished through parody when individually they're some of the best action set pieces of the 1990s. De Palma also lives up to his reputation as a master of suspense, threading together an intriguing, twist-heavy plot that (controversially) redefined its source material all while layering in plenty of paranoid tension and character drama.

It's a lot to juggle, but De Palma did so perfectly. It could be argued that better things were still to come, but that doesn't mean we should stop giving the first Mission: Impossible its well-deserved bouquet.