Spider-Man: Homecoming

Essential, and the best decision it makes is in the first minute: there is no origin. No spider, no uncle, no laboratory. The character had been introduced in Civil War and the film simply proceeds, which saves forty minutes and is the single biggest advantage of being inside a shared universe.

What it does instead is make a high-school film. Peter is fifteen, the stakes are a homecoming dance and an academic decathlon, and the entire plot is a boy desperately wanting to be promoted out of a job he is not ready for. The sequence where he is trapped under rubble in a warehouse and has to talk himself into lifting it is the best Spider-Man scene in any continuity.

Michael Keaton's Vulture is the franchise's best small villain. He is a salvage contractor put out of business when a government agency takes over the cleanup after the first Avengers film, and his grievance is specific, economic and entirely reasonable. The car journey in the third act, in which he works out who Peter is while making small talk, is a masterclass.

Tony Stark's presence annoys some viewers and it is doing deliberate work: the film is about a boy seeking approval from a man who should not be a parent. Watch it after Civil War.