25 best movie stunts ever

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

The undoubted highlight of Raiders of the Lost Ark is the truck chase, in which Indiana Jones does battle with an entire truck full of German soldiers before being thrown out the windscreen, dragged along behind the truck, crawling back along its side and wresting control from the driver. In all, the sequence featured over 50 stunts and 13 stuntmen, filming over 5 weeks for a total of 6 minutes footage.

And then Spielberg went and ruined it by dropping an out-of-place CGI shot into a recent TV version of the film. Fortunately, he's since come to his senses and the original, untouched movie will be released on Blu-ray.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

The new Batman film kicks off with a bang – in the opening sequence, masked terrorist Bane hijacks a plane by plucking it out of the air with another, bigger plane.

The stunt's pretty clearly inspired by the pre-titles sequence of Timothy Dalton Bond film License to Kill. Between that and Inception's mountain base raid paying homage to On Her Majesty's Secret Service, it's surely only a matter of time before Christopher Nolan helms a Bond film.

The Man With The Golden Gun (1974)

Roger Moore's James Bond gets another entry in the list with this jaw-dropping stunt – 007 leaps a broken bridge in his AMC Hornet, tracing a perfect corkscrew in the air. The stunt was performed by stunt driver "Bumps" Willett, and was actually engineered by Cornell University scientists using then-state-of-the-art IBM computers. Do a barrel roll!

District 13 (2004)

If you’re the founder of ‘parkour’ David Belle, you too would want to show off your leaping and landing talents in an elaborate chase scene across a Parisian estate. He and his co-stars hurl themselves through windows at swinging ropes and dance across rooftops without wires or CGI. Makes Spider-Man look overly cautious.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

We’d shout ‘Aw shit!’ if we were in the Sundance Kid’s position – not only is he stuck up on a cliff with his fellow outlaw Butch Cassidy but they’re about to jump into the rapids to escape their pursuers. And he can’t swim. Newman and Redford had a little help from two stuntmen (the actors landed on a mattress) but the real drop into the gorge in Colorado was a respectable 30 feet.