X-Men: First Class

Essential, and the strongest film in the Fox run after Logan. It is a soft reboot made after The Last Stand and Origins had exhausted the audience's patience, and it works by changing genre entirely: this is a 1962 spy film, with a split-screen recruitment montage, a submarine, a villain's lair and a plot built around the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Michael Fassbender is the reason it holds. Erik spends the first hour as a Nazi hunter moving through Argentina and Switzerland, and the sequence in the bar in Villa Gesell, in which he buys a drink for two old men and then establishes who they are, is the best scene in thirteen films. James McAvoy plays Charles as a privileged, slightly insufferable academic rather than a sage, which is a much better starting point.

The argument between them is finally given room. Erik's position, that the people in power will never permit mutants to exist and that waiting is a luxury, is allowed to be correct in the specific circumstances the film constructs, and the beach scene at the end is the series' best statement of why these two cannot agree.

Against it: Kevin Bacon's villain is thin, January Jones is given nothing, and a late decision about one character's loyalty is unearned. Production was unusually rushed, roughly a year from announcement to release, which shows in a few sequences. It is still the best entry point to the prequels.