Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Essential on continuity, and the version you watch changes the verdict. The theatrical cut runs a hundred and fifty-one minutes and is genuinely confusing; the Ultimate Edition restores around thirty, most of it a journalism subplot that explains who framed Superman and why, and the film goes from incoherent to merely overloaded. Watch the longer one.

The opening is the best idea in the DCEU: the Metropolis battle from the previous film, seen from street level by a man running toward the dust while his employees die in a collapsing building. Making Batman's motive the trauma of being a bystander to the first film is a genuinely strong way to connect the two.

Ben Affleck is the best live-action Batman, playing a man twenty years in who has become brutal and is aware of it, and the warehouse fight is the most convincing choreography the character has had on film. The Knightmare sequence is a tangent the film never justifies.

The standing objections are real: Jesse Eisenberg's Luthor is a jittery performance in a film with no room for it, the plot requires several people to behave inexplicably, and the reconciliation between the two leads turns on a shared first name, which has been a joke for a decade. The last act is a digital creature in a crater.