MGK Ranks Every Live-Action Marvel Movie Since 1998 (2018 Remix Edition)

(Since the last time I did this in 2014, there have been fifteen new Marvel movies from various studios released to theatres, so an update was warranted.)

THE ONES THAT ARE JUST TOTAL SHIT

47. Fantastic Four (2015) A godawful mess on every possible level, and no, even Michael B. Jordan doesn’t come away looking particularly good. Completely misses the point of the Fantastic Four on every level, but also misses the point of superhero movies in general. The script is dull both in terms of overall story arc and dialogue (there is not one joke in the entire goddamn movie that lands), plus its direction is hamfisted at best, with visual FX that mostly look cheap. An astonishing misfire that nearly ended Josh Trank’s career and got a lot of people fired, and all of it deservedly.

46. Man-Thing Brief theatrical run that was so brief it’s a direct-to-DVD in spirit. You have probably never seen it. You missed absolutely nothing. It is a mess in every possible way you can imagine, like Roger Corman came back from the dead (well, he’s not dead, but he hasn’t directed a movie in years so he might as well be, that’s what I say) and decided to make a SyFy Original Marvel Movie, which is basically what this is. It’s only not last because it’s so clumsy that it’s got that Asylum sort of charm, where you watch it and wonder what these bumblefucks thought they were doing, and because not so much money was wasted on it as on Fantastic Four.

45. Elektra A completely joyless slog that feels five times longer than it is, looking muddy and dull throughout – I mean, we all rightfully criticize today’s action blockbusters for adhering to that teal/orange color dichotomy like it is law, but at least teal and orange doesn’t look awful and bland all the time like Elektra does with its near-universal beige visuals. Tack on a nearly incoherent plot, action scenes which rely so heavily on bullet-time that the entire thing feels like it’s in slo-mo, and the pacing of a dead turtle and you have one of the worst “true” theatrical Marvel releases of the modern era. Heck, it’s probably worse than the 1990 Captain America and the Corman Fantastic Four. (It’s definitely worse than the Dolph Lundgren Punisher.)

44. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer An incoherent load of below-par SFX, a storyline that made little sense, next to no jokes (and how can you have a good F4 movie without at least some jokes?), but at least it’s over relatively soon because it’s 92 minutes long and that’s with a lot of very obvious script padding (as scenes just all go too long) because they didn’t have enough ideas to fill ninety lousy goddamn minutes. A complete waste of Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans, who don’t even get to shine like they did in the first film. Not even slightly ironically fun.

THE ONES THAT ARE BAD

43. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Critics were kinder to this than it deserved. “Spider-Man kills the baddie” is a trope that needs to simply not be a thing. The plot is stutter-stop because there are, of course, two villains (Jamie Foxx is an awful Electro and Dane DeHaan is an especially awful Harry Osborn/Green Goblin) with mostly-separate plotlines that make the film seem nearly schizophrenic. Gwen Stacy’s death feels editorially mandated in the worst possible way.

42. X-Men Origins: Wolverine Proof that you can spend an immense amount of money on a superhero movie, have competent filmmakers, have a solid cast (seriously: Hugh Jackman, Liev Schrieber, Ryan Reynolds, Danny Huston – that’s damn good) and it can still be a creative failure in every way that matters. The grimdarkness of the mid-period X-franchise permeates this on every level. Worth mentioning in discussion only for somehow, on a very belated scale, allowing the Deadpool movie to happen.

41. Punisher: War Zone It has a sort of craziness to it that I admire, Ray Stevenson is an inspired casting choice for the Punisher and Dominic West’s Jigsaw is enjoyably loony. But the problem is that simply taking Garth Ennis comic dialogue and putting it on screen does not work – there is printed page material and there is reading aloud material, and what is poetic on the page falls flat when you say it aloud. “There are times when I’d like to get my hands on God” is an amazing line in print, but spoken aloud it becomes bombastic and silly in a way that’s almost impossible to avoid. And the action is mostly bland, which is unforgivable for a Punisher film. A Punisher film, to work properly, should have the action of a John Woo classic combined with the moral dread of a Coen Brothers drama. This is not that.

40. Ghost Rider I think Nicolas Cage’s commitment to the wackiness of the idea of Ghost Rider is underrated even though he was slightly too old for the role when he first played Johnny Blaze – but when you’re saying “hey, 2007 Nicolas Cage is the best thing about this movie,” you know it’s probably not that good a movie because ironically liking Shitty Nicolas Cage is bad and this is bad. Ghost Rider overexplains itself like all get out, which is fatal in a movie that is about a guy who has a flaming skull for a head and rides a motorcycle that is also on fire. (ASIDE: Peter Fonda should have been a lock to be Mephisto and it just doesn’t sing.)

39. Blade: Trinity A mediocre third outing to the franchise which more or less killed it. (FUN FACT: they were hoping to spin a Nightstalkers franchise out of this film. Man, did that not work or what?) At this point the Blade flicks were running out of ideas – when you go to the Dracula well in a vampire-related franchise that’s rarely a good sign unless you invert it cleverly (a la Buffy in season four) and this movie did not do that. It’s not outright terrible by any means: there are some fun performances here (Patton Oswalt is particularly enjoyable), Wesley Snipes is quite reliable as Blade as he always is, and the action sequences are mostly competent. But it’s not anything other than a third movie in a dying series and it doesn’t elevate beyond that.

38. Fantastic Four (2005) It’s more coherent than its sequel, but remains mostly not very good. You see this for Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans’ performances, which are both excellent. Everything else about this movie is bland: Jessica Alba’s Sue is boring, Ioan Gruffud’s Reed doesn’t really work (it’s like he’s got an idea of who Reed is but can’t quite get there to make it work) and the less said about Julian McMahon’s Dr. Doom the better. Between this and the Trank I do wonder if it’s even possible to make a Fantastic Four movie that works for a mass audience, because the F4’s whole deal, really, is that they’re cool because they’re mostly so militantly uncoool, and that doesn’t play in Hollywood executive meetings.

37. Hulk There are a lot of contrarians who like to pretend that this is a good movie. It isn’t a good movie; it’s a misfire. A misfire by talented creators, to be sure, because Ang Lee was trying to do something to work outside the superhero box, and it shows: the film is a substantial whole, a work unto itself, trying to say something in a visual language entirely new to comics movies by outright adapting comics visual vocabulary to do it. Which is a really interesting idea, to say the least. The problem is that this language is visually unappealing and in service to a story that is simply dreadful: I defy anyone to explain the ending in a way that makes sense, and the bit with the gamma-irradiated poodle is just stupid.

36. The Amazing Spider-Man Excellent performances by Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone can’t redeem a clumsily plotted Spider-Man origin story and a major mangling of Spidey’s character (if your Spider-Man story has him consumed by revenge, you are doing it wrong). A massive mangling of the Lizard as the villain doesn’t help either.

35. X-Men: Apocalypse “A huge and talented cast is almost entirely wasted by a perfunctory and boring script” seems like it could describe more than a few superhero movies, but I am hard-pressed to think of a major-budget superhero picture that feels as obligatory as this one. It’s just boring as shit, with tons of FX to compensate for the fact that Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy are clearly completely bored to death with Magneto and Xavier, and when Fassbender and McAvoy are checked out there’s simply not a lot to carry the new-generation X-flicks because these films depend so heavily on their charisma.

34. Daredevil Another victim of the “what makes a superhero more relatable is making the superhero grittier and more morally compromised” school of superhero moviemaking, but at least ends with Daredevil rejecting that philosophy, so that’s something, I guess? Ben Affleck’s performance as Matt Murdock is acceptable, as is Michael Clarke Duncan’s Kingpin, but neither is amazing; only Colin Farrell’s Bullseye is greatly entertaining. Jennifer Garner’s Elektra is kinda bad, but not so bad to make the movie memorably bad; it is forgettable popcorn fare in the bare-minimum sort of way.

THE ONES THAT ARE PASSABLE I GUESS

33. X-Men: The Last Stand This one gets pounded a lot because it’s supposedly the weakest of the X-flicks (it’s not) and because it awkwardly merges multiple classic comics storylines into a weird melange (yeah, okay, but all the X-movies do that) and because Brett Ratner’s direction is, to say the least, uninspired (totally fair). But it has some nice bits. It has Ellen Page in it as Shadowcat! And Kelsey Grammer’s Beast is exactly who Beast needed to be. It could have been so much worse, and it is not. That’s something?

32. Spider-Man 3 Some nerds love to hate on the Dancin’ Evil Peter sequence, and I am not one of them – it’s fun. That having been said: like the other Spider-Man movies, this has a lot of craftsmanship in it. But it again goes to the “Spider-Man needs to have someone to seek revenge against for Uncle Ben’s death” well, which is awful and terrible and completely misses the point of the character. (It really drives home how ambitious Christopher Nolan was to remove revenge as a motive for Batman in his trilogy.) Combine that with the needless inclusion of Venom as demanded by the studio’s marketing department and you have a movie which is cluttered, confused and flawed.

31. The Incredible Hulk Probably the poster child for ensuring a lack of downside risk in a Marvel movie, which likely makes it the blueprint off which future Marvel films were based. There is nothing wrong with Incredible Hulk, other than that it is fairly predictable and fairly safe as entertainment goes, avoiding risk in vast chunks and doing its level best to avoid offending any viewer regardless of preference. But, again: this is a movie that knows what it wants to do and does it competently and professionally. Artistry is sort of an optional extra.

30. The Wolverine This is the “okay” Wolverine solo movie. It is defiantly average as superhero movies go. There are ninjas. And Wolverine. And that is basically it. I mean, it’s nice to see a superhero movie with a majority-person-of-color-cast, that’s certainly true, but you can’t shake the feeling that this entire $100 million movie was sort of improvised on a page-by-page basis based on when the ninjas were available. But at least they’re fun ninjas.

29. Iron Man 2 I know some people are going to complain about a Robert Downey Jr. As Iron Man movie being ranked this low, but here is my counterpoint: tell me what this movie was about off the top of your head. Because you can’t. I had to actively think for a while to remember who the villain was (it’s Mickey Rourke! Remember that? Mickey Rourke was the villain in the second Iron Man movie) or any detail of the plot other than “RDJ quips, and War Machine stuff, and um Black Widow makes her debut in the Marvel movies.” That was all I had. This is not to say that Iron Man 2 isn’t entertaining. It is. But it’s also mostly insubstantial.

28. Blade II Guillermo del Toro’s only Marvel movie is occasionally (but not always) visually striking, and has that gritty-B-movie fun factor that the original Blade had as well. And it’s got tons of great genre actors in it: Donnie Yen, Ron Perlman, a very young Norman Reedus, the guy who played Cat in Red Dwarf, that sort of thing. But it’s got a boring plot (basically: vampires versus zombie vampires) that’s just there to string together the fight sequences. Which are mostly great, admittedly, but Del Toro had already made better than this and would surpass this easily; it’s really kind of a low point in his catalogue.

27. Avengers: Age of Ultron There’s a good movie in here somewhere, but this is probably the apex of Marvel movies being studio-driven in their mandate to continue the overarcing metaplot tying everything together and it suffers for that. (Marvel course-corrected shortly afterward and it’s probably not a coincidence that when Guardians of the Galaxy, a project which has a lot of James Gunn’s personal sensibilities in it, made a fuckton more money than this did, that Marvel started allowing their directors to personalize their projects a little more.) I think James Spader’s turn as Ultron is really underrated, and the action sequences are good, but it’s just a movie that suffers from Too Much Movie bloat.

26. The Punisher This one is one of the more underrated Marvel flicks, mostly because people had enormously overinflated hopes for a Punisher movie “done right.” This is because the Punisher, outside of comics, is just your bog-standard vigilante/murder fantasy, and that doesn’t translate remarkably well to film because it just becomes, well, a vigilante movie. The Thomas Jane Punisher movie, however, is probably the best of them; if you forgot Marvel Comics existed, this would be a decent crime/revenge movie. It has good action, decent performances from Jane and John Travolta, and a solid plot. Certainly it can be described as unambitious, but then again this is a movie that aims for “solid” and hits it, and there are worse things.

25. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance This is basically the opposite of Punisher in that it is ridiculously ambitious and shoots for the moon and misses quite a bit, but it has great action sequences, and Ghost Rider turning a giant digger machine into a Hell-cycle, and Nic Cage and Ciaran Hinds and Idris Elba and Johnny Whitworth having a contest to see who can chew the most scenery. It is insane. And it’s fun. High peaks and extremely deep valleys, to be sure. But it’s never boring.

THE ONES THAT ARE FUN AND NOT A WASTE OF TIME BUT MAYBE NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO BE CALLED “GOOD” YET

24. Thor: The Dark World It is relentlessly entertaining. This is the one that was hardest for me to rank, probably because on the one hand it is the Marvel film I enjoyed terrifically while watching and then later, on sober second thought when the adrenalin of the experience was gone, thought “hmmm” – because enjoyment of the film helps one forget that the villain is bland and the magical McGuffin is meaningless and the plot just a series of excuses to have Loki do neato things and the film’s gender politics are just plain bad (especially after the first Thor was so good in this regard). And then I watched it again and it was still very entertaining. But it still bugs me.

23. X-Men: First Class There’s a lot of silly bits in here and a lot of things you can quibble over or complain about (how it instantly becomes Team Whitebread as the good guys, how the guy whose power is “don’t get killed” IS LITERALLY THE FIRST ONE WHO DIES, Jennifer Lawrence being underwhelming, January Jones being completely awful at everything she does, etc.) but the gorgeous sense of design, skilled direction by Matthew Vaughn, and the stupidly good performances of James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are what make this watchable.

22. Doctor Strange Personal biases would probably make me rank this higher, but honesty demands that this is where it lands because its major flaw is that it doesn’t really nail Strange’s character well until the end, and his journey to that point is unsatisfying in terms of character arc. Basically it serves its purpose as a way to integrate Doc into the MCU proper (as Strange’s appearance in Thor: Ragnarok is excellent), and it’s visually imaginative and every performance is basically good. But it’s not really anything more than that.

21. X-Men Deserves credit for inspiring the new wave of superhero movies in the first place, and beyond that it holds up surprisingly well. A nice balance between nerd callouts and easy access for newbs, well-directed by Bryan Singer with tight editing and gorgeous cinematography, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine is still a revelation and the script balances pathos, action and moments of comedy quite well. It still has numerous weak spots (Halle Berry, and also Halle Berry), and the pacing is definitely askew much of the time, but it’s amazing how much this film got right on what was more or less the first try when so many others failed when they had examples of what worked and what didn’t.

THE ONES THAT ARE GOOD

20. Iron Man Let’s be honest: the third act of this film is at best a hot mess and at worst confused sludge, and we all forgive it that, because RDJ kickstarted the Modern Marvel Movie Movement ™ and because you get to see Jeff Bridges’ performance as The Dude Except Now He’s Evil (IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!) and because the first two-thirds of the film are just about perfect, so we let it limp to the finish and nobody really complains. But its strengths as a film have largely been eclipsed by second- and third-generation Marvel fare at this point. It’s still good, but there’s so much now that is better.

19. Ant-Man Gets by on a mostly paper-thin plot by relying on clever visual gags, much more storytelling flair than most Marvel movies have, and a set of really winning performances from Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas and Michael Pena, and Evangeline Lilly is allowed to stay within her range and is fine. Has a weak ending (Scott Lang can reverse being stuck in the unescapable quantum thingerdoo because of The Power of Love, I guess?), and the Bobby Cannavale character and his subplot just actively gets in the way of the movie (there is literally nothing he does that wouldn’t work better being done by Judy Greer’s ex-wife character instead, but she’s a lady person so of course we need a dude to be a minor antagonist) but this one is just gently funny all the way through.

18. Spider-Man The general lack of Spider-jokes (other than the inspired “go web!” sequence) is a shame, but other than that Spider-Man is an exceptionally well-crafted film in just about every respect. If, tonally, it is not quite accurate to its source material, that is forgivable given the impressiveness of its visual skill (Sam Raimi spent a decade making these films and it was time well spent), its strong story, fine performances from Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and Willem Dafoe, and excellent special effects (which he would improve upon in the sequel, but even so). But at this point, that level of craft is just the minimum standard to be expected.

17. X2 Everybody understands that this sequel is simply superior throughout to the original; bigger stakes, mostly superior performances (Alan Cumming’s Nightcrawler and Brian Cox’ Stryker are standouts, but this is also Famke Janssen’s best work in the franchise and Ian McKellen is at the height of his powers as Magneto), and by this point Bryan Singer was developing his previous visual flair into a sense of craft that results in a film that is just endlessly watchable. Everything about this is good and nothing is bad.

16. Deadpool It’s extremely funny, but in between a quarter and a third of the jokes are of the not-funny-on-a-second-viewing variety, which is a little disappointing. And the action is mostly just sorta okay rather than the holy-crap-ninjas-on-acid-experience one would ideally want out of a Deadpool movie. Still, it’s intelligent, has faith in both its audience and courage in its core concept, and really just goes for that R rating in a way you have to admire on multiple levels.

15. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 Others have noted that there’s a really solid sentimental core to this film, about surviving abuse and coming to terms with one’s abusers, which is sort of remarkable for a superhero-aliens movie. That’s true. It has a lovely ending, too, and Kurt Russell’s Ego is a terrific villain, and all of the Guardians performers who were good in the first one are just as good in this one. That having been said, that stupid manifestation of Pac-Man at the movie’s action climax is so goddamned annoying it makes me knock it down a bunch of ranks. It’s just that bad.

THE ONES THAT ARE VERY GOOD

14. Thor: Ragnarok Super-entertaining joyfluff, with nary a bad performance to be seen and gorgeous visuals and score throughout. It’s efferevescent and lightless, and the reason it doesn’t make my top ten is precisely because of that. There’s not enough weight to it. Hela is a villain for the sake of needing a villain in the story: there’s no reason for her to be so evil, she just is because the story needs a baddie. There’s no definitive scene, either, no one scene that makes you say “oh, yes, this is the mission statement for this movie, distilled down into maybe ninety seconds that makes you understand why you made it.” And this all sounds like I hate it, and I don’t, I love this film, I love its craft, I love all of the jokes, I love everything about it. But there should have been more.

13. X-Men: Days of Future Past This one doesn’t really have an emotional core in the way that some of the other high-ranked films do, but it’s just about perfect as a distillation of a comic book movie. Superheroes, dystopic futures, time travel, alternate timelines, talking to variant versions of yourself: this one goes harder on comic-book concepts than just about any other superhero movie period, and it nails the dismount spectacularly. Great performances (the best of the Fassbender/McAvoy X-flicks by far for that cast, plus Jackman and P-Stew et al), rock-solid direction, and enough nerd shit that it was likely shat out by a veritable herd of nerd cows.

12. Spider-Man: Homecoming This is probably the best Spider-Man movie ever made. (Spider-Man 2 is a better movie overall, but you have to admit that it is also a superhero movie about a guy who looks a lot like Spider-Man rather than a Spider-Man movie proper, because the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man loses so much of what makes Spidey Spidey.) Earns points for not retelling the origin story again, for one of the best Marvel villains in Michael Keaton’s Vulture, for a lot of comedy that works extremely well. Loses points for a supposed Modern Teens Dance playing 80s songs, though.

11. Iron Man 3 Many have said that Iron Man 3 feels like a Shane Black movie that happens to be a Marvel movie, rather than a Marvel movie that happens to be directed by Shane Black – including myself, previously – but at this point after other directors have had the chance to really stretch the Marvel movie formula to fit their own personal styles that comment feels less accurate. That said, it is still smart and clever (recognizing that Movie Tony can’t really work as an alcoholic and substituting PTSD for it was particularly brilliant) and at times barely feels like a superhero movie at all. Of course, that is a bit of a problem because it is a superhero movie, or at least intended to be. But only a bit of a problem.

10. Captain America: Civil War It is overly long and does suffer somewhat from story creep because it is both, at once, the third Captain America movie but also the second-and-a-halfish Avengers movie. But, beyond that, there is very little to complain about with this movie, which manages to combine an effects-driven blockbuster with a character-driven conflict story and it all mostly works, far more elegantly than it realistically should be able to manage, juggling so many balls in the air and never really dropping any of them, with several set-pieces that are all-timers in the Marvel canon and one of the absolute best villains in any Marvel movie, regardless of MCU or not.

9. Guardians of the Galaxy This is a true story: a comics professional with deep connections throughout the industry told me, confidently, about eight months before Guardians came out that Marvel had mostly given up on it being a potential franchise, in large part because the original corporate motivation for it was to have a “space franchise” for Marvel to compete with Star Wars – and then Disney bought Star Wars, and Guardians was considered an ill-fated stepchild that the studio was prepared to give up on. And then the trailer (still one of the truly great trailers) hit and Rocket Raccoon was shooting people with his laser gun and the movie made a bajillion dollars, because audiences recognized a movie that knew itself and what it wanted to be: a rollicking space adventure comedy that understood not only that a raccoon with a laser gun was great, but that a movie where a raccoon had a laser gun had to both embrace its absurdity but also not let that absurdity define it.

8. Thor As time progresses I periodically return to this one and I think, more and more, it is one of the most underappreciated Marvel movies. Probably the most. Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespearean direction works so fluidly with the characters and the story. The jokes almost wholly land perfectly: Chris Hemsworth demonstrated here for the first time his cheerful willingness to make Thor look like a lovable dope, and certainly in movies following they’ve been willing to take that further but he gets so much credit for getting the ball rolling. The “asshole learns to be a good person” story arc feels earned here in a way that it doesn’t in many other superhero flicks. And it’s colorful and bright, an outlier in that regard for Marvel films of the time when their preferred digital cameras tended to mute color palettes (thank god they’ve corrected course there).

7. Blade If X-Men is responsible for the modern superhero movie, we have to give Blade credit for making Hollywood think that Marvel Comics was something that could be exploited in the first place. But Blade is more than that; it is in its own right an amazing action/horror picture, just about flawless in every respect – the sort of B-movie that filmmakers imitate endlessly (and have done). There is simply nothing Blade does wrong.

6. The Avengers Now, if you want to point to things The Avengers does wrong – the lighting for many of the interior shots is insipid at best and cheap-looking at worst (Joss Whedon may not have been the cinematographer but it seems he wanted it to look like boring TV), the primary arc of the movie really is just a Cap/Iron Man buddy story, Thor doesn’t get enough dialogue, the Hulk reveal doesn’t make sense really, and the Thanos end-reveal is nerdwank of the highest order. But, on the other hand, they successfully made a superhero team movie of epic scale, the Battle of New York is probably the best long-form action sequence on film since the end of Hard Boiled, it doesn’t sag and it’s never boring. When we talk about movies being ambitious, it is worth remembering that Avengers was attempting to do something that had never been done, was by all accounts almost impossible to manage, and almost entirely pulled it off.

THE ONES THAT ARE GREAT

5. Spider-Man 2 Ebert’s favorite superhero movie and justifiably so: this is the height of Sam Raimi’s creative vision. Just watch any of the Spidey/Ock fights; they are simply perfect filmmaking. The balance between action and drama is expertly maintained. Alfred Molina’s performance is staggeringly good. I could say so many more things but they would all be superlatives.

4. Captain America: The First Avenger As Iron Man 3 is recognizably a Shane Black movie, so is Captain America recognizably a Joe Johnston movie; the lush colour palette Johnston utilized in The Rocketeer is present, as is Johnston’s well-documented love of homaging old Republic serials. But what makes Captain America so good is the emotional notes of regret and loss that are omnipresent throughout the film: despite being a superhero movie, this is a film whose core emotion is sadness, and that feeling hits at every beat of the movie, most notably in Chris Evans’ magnificent performance as Cap – he’s not as showy as RDJ’s Iron Man is, but I think it’s a more fully realized performance on the whole. The overall effect is to make the film slightly downbeat (which I think hurt it) but it also feels more mature and adult.

3. Captain America: The Winter Soldier Winter Soldier is even better than the other Cap movies, taking numerous visual cues from 1970s conspiracy thrillers in service of a taut, engaging story about government overreach which would fuel a lot of further Marvel flicks. This is a film that has the narrative confidence to simply skip a difficult and exciting heist because it needs to put the time elsewhere, a film that doesn’t bother explaining its tropes because it trusts the audience not to be stupid, a film that doesn’t feel the need to justify Arnim Zola as a living bank of computers or how Falcon’s jetpack works, but just shoves it out there immediately. This is the Marvel movie in maturity, and it feels so good to see it.

THE ONES THAT AREN’T JUST GREAT FOR MARVEL MOVIES BUT GREAT FOR ALL FILMS PERIOD

2. Black Panther Action filmmaking more realized than just about any other Marvel film so far, in service of a story that is, when you get down to it, about dueling philosophies of Black liberation (except that the dueling philosophies are embodied in people who are actually fighting each other), with stunning visuals, an intense score and soundtrack both, and performances that go beyond the usual rock-solidity that you get in Marvel movies and often hit near-profundity in their excellence. Plus all of the jokes work. It is amazing that this was made; it is beyond amazing how perfect an action film it manages to be.

1. Logan I keep coming back to that one scene where Logan, after burying Xavier, just starts attacking his truck with a tree branch until he collapses in rage and exhaustion, because it’s not cool Wolverine Berserker Rage ™ that he’s doing in that scene, it’s tired-old-man-who’s-furious-at-the-world-rage, in a movie where the moral is about how violence corrodes everybody and how it inevitably poisons your soul. They did that in a superhero movie. They also dealt, both matter-of-factly and fantastically, with the horror of coping with Alzheimer’s and senility – both as a patient and a caregiver. This movie is just so utterly unconcerned with being cool most of the time, in a way that makes it matter more than any Marvel movie so far.

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