Wonder Woman

Essential, and the best-received DCEU film. It is also the one with the fewest prerequisites: it is set in 1918, decades before everything else in the continuity, and a viewer can start here knowing nothing.

What it does better than its neighbours is sincerity. Patty Jenkins directs a protagonist who is unironic, morally certain and frequently wrong about how the world works, and the comedy comes from that collision rather than from anybody being arch. The London sequences, with Diana appalled by a society that will not let a woman into a room, are funnier than the film needed to be.

The No Man's Land sequence is the best scene in the DCEU and the reason the film is remembered. She is told the ground cannot be crossed, crosses it anyway, and the whole thing is about somebody refusing to accept a strategic argument for leaving people where they are. It works because the film has spent an hour establishing exactly how naive that is.

The third act is the standing complaint and it is correct: a protracted digital fight against a god in the sky, with lightning, which is precisely the register the rest of the film avoids. Chris Pine is very good and the film treats his ending with more care than most would.