The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Essential as the introduction of a family the next two Avengers films are built around, and it is the cleanest entry point Marvel has offered in years: it is set in a separate universe, requires nothing, and opens with the team already four years into the job and famous.

Skipping the origin is the right call for the fourth attempt at these characters, and the film replaces it with a sixty-second newsreel. What it uses the time on instead is the retro-futurist setting, an alternate 1960s with flying cars, reel-to-reel computers and a space programme, which is the most committed production design Marvel has done.

The film is unusually small for its premise. A planet-eating entity is coming, the response is largely domestic, and the central crisis is a decision about a child that the family has to make in a kitchen. Vanessa Kirby's Sue Storm is the lead in everything but billing and is the best thing in it.

Galactus is rendered at a scale the franchise has not attempted, and the Silver Surfer sequences are the most striking imagery in Phase Six. The pace is brisk to the point of hurried at a hundred and fifteen minutes, and a subplot or two is resolved in a line. Watch it before Avengers: Doomsday.