X-Men

Essential, and start here rather than with First Class, whatever the chronological order on this page offers. The prequels are written for people who already know who these characters become, and almost every beat in them is a recognition rather than an introduction.

It is also the film the entire modern genre descends from, two years before Spider-Man and eight before Iron Man. At a hundred and four minutes it is startlingly lean by current standards: one plot, six characters, a machine on a statue, and no setup for anything.

The decision that defined the decade was the costumes. Bryan Singer took the comics' primary colours off and put everyone in black leather, and the film makes a joke about it out loud, which told an audience that had never taken this material seriously that the film had not either. That calculation was right in 2000 and it is also why the series spent fifteen years looking drab.

Hugh Jackman was cast weeks into shooting after the original choice withdrew, was almost unknown, and is the reason the franchise ran for twenty years. The central idea, that this is a civil rights story with one leader arguing for integration and one for self-defence, is stated clearly in the first scene and is more than most of these films manage. The effects have dated badly; nothing else has.