Superman

Essential, and the film every superhero picture since is descended from. Before it, comics on screen meant camp television. Richard Donner's instruction to his crew was a single word, verisimilitude, pinned up on set, and the whole production is organised around taking an absurd premise completely seriously.

The structure is three films in sequence and the joins are deliberate. Twenty minutes on Krypton in operatic register, with Marlon Brando reportedly paid more for twelve days than anyone in Hollywood had been paid before. Then a Kansas childhood shot like a Terrence Malick film, with a farm, a long shot of wheat and a death nobody can prevent. Then a screwball newspaper comedy in Metropolis.

Christopher Reeve is the reason it survives. The flying is good for 1978 and the performance is the achievement: he plays two people with different postures, different voices and different timing, and the scene where he almost tells Lois who he is, straightening up and dropping the stammer for four seconds, is the best thing in any film on this page. John Williams wrote the theme everybody can hum.

The ending is the flaw, resolving a death by flying around the planet until time runs backwards, and the film has no interest in explaining it. Gene Hackman plays Luthor as a vain property speculator, which is funnier and smaller than the part has been since.