Spider-Man: No Way Home

Essential, and it is the film on this page with the most homework. Watch the Raimi trilogy and the two Amazing Spider-Man films first, or at least the first two of each. The entire back half of this film is built on characters from two other continuities, and a viewer who does not know them is watching strangers be emotional.

The structural idea is sound. Peter asks for a spell to make the world forget who he is, it goes wrong, and it pulls in people from other universes who know. What the film then does with that is unexpected: rather than a fight, Peter decides to cure the villains before sending them home, which turns the middle act into a rehabilitation story and produces the one genuinely bad outcome the franchise has let him have.

Alfred Molina and Willem Dafoe are the reason it works. Dafoe in particular is playing a part twenty years later with no loss of menace, and the apartment sequence is the best scene in any Spider-Man film.

It is also pure fan service for a long stretch, and the film is aware of it. The ending is the best thing the character has been given on screen: he loses everything, keeps nothing, and the final shot is a man alone in a cheap flat sewing a costume. Brand New Day follows from it.