Black Panther

Essential, and the most culturally significant film the franchise has made. It was the first Marvel film nominated for Best Picture and it arrived as an event in a way few blockbusters do.

What distinguishes it is that the conflict is political rather than personal. Wakanda is a technologically advanced nation that has hidden for centuries and watched the world without intervening, and the film is about whether that isolation was prudence or cowardice. The new king is asked to defend a policy he inherited and cannot justify.

Michael B. Jordan's Killmonger is the best villain in the franchise and the only one whose argument the film concedes. He is a child abandoned in Oakland by a kingdom that could have helped and chose not to, and his programme, arming the dispossessed worldwide, is presented as monstrous in method and correct in diagnosis. The last line he speaks is the most quoted in the Infinity Saga.

Ryan Coogler directs it with a specificity Marvel films usually lack: the costume design, the languages, the Afrofuturist production design and the Kendrick Lamar soundtrack all pull in one direction. The final act's digital rhinos are the weak point. Chadwick Boseman's performance is quieter than everything around it and holds the centre.