Iron Man 3

Essential, and the most interesting of the Iron Man films. Shane Black took over and made something closer to his own 1990s thrillers than to a superhero sequel: a Christmas film, with a voice-over, a wisecracking kid, a dismantled hero and long stretches where Tony has no suit and no money and is working out of a Tennessee garage.

The subject is what the previous year's alien invasion did to a man who flew a nuclear weapon through a hole in the sky. He cannot sleep, builds compulsively, and has panic attacks that the film treats as panic attacks. A blockbuster sequel whose protagonist spends the middle act unable to function was a genuine risk.

The twist is the most argued-about decision in the franchise, and it is a good one. The terrorist everybody fears turns out to be an unemployed actor hired to be a face, with the actual culprit a businessman using him as a brand, which is both a sharp joke about the war on terror and a betrayal of a character some readers had wanted for decades. Ben Kingsley is superb in both halves of it.

The last act is forty suits fighting in a shipyard, which is the thing the film had spent two hours arguing against. The Air Force One rescue is the best set piece in the trilogy.