Superman

Essential, and the best entry point to the DCU, despite not being first in its chronology. It assumes nothing, and the one genuinely bold structural choice is that it skips the origin entirely: the film opens with Superman already three years into the job, already famous, already losing a fight, in a world that has had metahumans for decades.

That decision frees it to be about something else. The subject is public opinion: a government-adjacent billionaire runs a campaign to turn the country against him, using a manufactured controversy about his parents' message, and the film is about a fundamentally decent person discovering that being right is not sufficient. The international plot, involving an invasion of a smaller neighbour by a US-backed state, is more pointed than anything in the DCEU.

David Corenswet plays him as earnest and slightly overwhelmed, which is correct, and Rachel Brosnahan's Lois is a journalist first: the interview scene, in which she presses him on the legality of what he has just done and he cannot answer, is the best in the film. Nicholas Hoult's Luthor is a tech proprietor consumed by resentment.

It is crowded, with three other heroes, a pocket universe, a dog and a kaiju in the first act, and the pace never lets anything settle. The tone is bright and sincere in a way the genre had drifted away from.