Avengers: Endgame

Essential, and it is the conclusion the whole project was built toward. At a hundred and eighty-one minutes it is the longest film here and the first hour is its most unusual stretch: a failure, then a five-year jump, then a series of quiet scenes about people who lost and did not recover. Thor has given up, Clint has become a murderer, and Steve is running a support group.

The time heist that follows is a victory lap and it knows it. Returning to the sites of earlier films to retrieve the stones gives the cast a chance to play against their own younger performances, and the 2012 New York sequence in particular is a comedy about how much the characters have changed.

The final battle is the single largest thing the franchise has staged, and three or four beats in it are the most purely satisfying moments in twenty years of this genre. They work entirely because of films that came before, which is both the achievement and the limitation: almost none of it lands on a newcomer.

It is also the first Marvel film with no post-credits scene, and the sound of a hammer on metal over black is the right full stop. Two of the original six are written out permanently. Watch it directly after Infinity War.