Logan

Essential, and the best film on this page by a wide margin. It is also the most watchable cold: set in 2029 after everything else has failed, it tells you in the first ten minutes that the X-Men are gone, that no mutant has been born in twenty-five years, and that nothing you might remember still applies.

It is a western rather than a superhero film, and openly so: the characters watch Shane in a hotel room and the film quotes it at the end. Logan drives a limousine on the Texas border, is drinking himself through a healing factor that has stopped working, and is keeping a ninety-year-old man with a degenerative brain condition sedated in a collapsed water tank because that man's seizures are now a weapon.

Patrick Stewart's performance is the most painful thing in the genre. A character who has been the moral authority of eight films is frightened, incontinent and occasionally lucid enough to know it, and the film refuses to make that dignified.

Dafne Keen was eleven and is extraordinary, silent for most of the first hour. The violence is the point rather than a selling point: after seventeen years of bloodless certificates, the film makes what Logan actually does to people visible and unbearable. It was the first live-action superhero film nominated for a screenplay Academy Award. A black-and-white version exists and is worth seeking out on a second watch.