The 30 best superhero films of all time, ranked

Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight, 2008 - Alamy

From having rich, dead parents to being bitten by a radioactive spider, there are many ways to qualify as a superhero, so perhaps it’s fitting that the superhero movie is one of the most inclusive and welcoming genres of all.

There’s no immediately obvious common ground between a suspenseful M Night Shyamalan drama about a security guard blessed with unnatural resilience and strength, and a swashbuckling space adventure co-starring a talking raccoon and a sentient tree – yet we intuitively place both in the superhero category.

Perhaps that’s because each film says something about our collective human desire for a certain kind of champion to rise up in troubled times – a vigilante who has our best interests at heart, but doesn’t abide by the laws, either societal or physical, that hold us back. Or perhaps it’s just because we love dual identities, fantastical struggles between good and evil, and fancy, skin-tight costumes, and it’s useful to group stories that provide all three under the same catch-all heading.

So in ranking the greatest superhero films of all time, we’ve tried to keep things flexible (you can skip to the top 10 here). Some are based on pre-existing comic books while others aren’t; and some centre on humans with extraordinary powers while others don’t. Some are science fiction, some are fantasy, and others fall somewhere in between. But all of them are terrifically entertaining – and if Hollywood’s superhero fixation continues to yield films this great, then long may it continue.

30. Kick-Ass (2010)

Chloë Grace Moretz as Hit-Girl - Daniel Smith/Film Stills

Hugely controversial in its day, not least for the expletive-slinging, katana-swinging Hit-Girl, played by the then-12-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz, Matthew Vaughn’s jet-black comic romp plays with the narcotic tug of super-heroism on the teenage brain: rather than weedy Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) losing himself in comic books, he turns his life into one. Transgressive, uproarious and, best of all, genuinely troubling.

29. Chronicle (2012)

Dane DeHaan in Chronicle - Alan Markfield/Film Stills

Josh Trank’s found-footage superhero movie has grown steadily in reputation since its muted 2012 release. The premise, in which three teenagers gain telekinetic powers from an alien artefact, begins in lively step with any number of similar origin stories, but then the tone darkens, and moral complexities start seeping in.

28. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Guardians of the Galaxy: ‘A bone-deep understanding of sci-fi-fantasy adventure’ - AP

Marvel’s diligence in franchise-building was once such that they used it to introduce audiences to characters 99 per cent of us had never previously heard of. James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy remains their most original project to date, with the beguiling, surface-level craziness (the team of heroes includes a sentient tree and a gun-toting raccoon) underpinned by a bone-deep understanding of sci-fi-fantasy adventure.

27. Big Hero 6 (2014)

Hiro Hamada, a grieving youngster, befriends an inflatable robot nurse called Baymax in Big Hero 6 - Disney/Film Stills

Walt Disney Animation Studios’s 54th animated feature puffs up the superhero movie with heart and soul to bursting point. It bears less resemblance to the little-known Marvel comic on which it’s based than Disney’s own earlier surrogate-big-brother movies – think of Aladdin and The Jungle Book – and, in places, the pastoral magic of Hayao Miyazaki. Hiro Hamada, a grieving youngster, befriends an inflatable robot nurse called Baymax, and together they investigate the appearance of a strange masked man in the mashed-up metropolis of San Fransokyo. The film pulsates with pure, open-hearted joy, in a genre that too often overlooks it.

26. Blade II (2002)

Wesley Snipes as Blade

Marvel’s ice-cool vampire-hunter Blade (Wesley Snipes) had his own superhero trilogy tied up back in 2004, before the genre really exploded. But its middle chapter, directed by Guillermo del Toro, out-manoeuvres almost everything that followed: it’s pure adrenaline in audio-visual form – a whirlwind of blood, fire and steel.

25. The Crow (1994)

Brandon Lee in The Crow - Collection Christophel/Photoshot

It’s infamous as the movie that killed its star, Brandon Lee – he was accidentally shot on set during filming – and it stands as a memorial to this brilliant young actor’s tragically unfulfilled potential. It’s ironically apt that the film that prematurely stole Lee away is about a death-cheating drive to correct the cruelty of fate. He plays a rock guitarist who’s murdered with his fiancée on the night before their wedding, and then returns to the world of the living to take revenge on the thugs responsible. The director, Alex Proyas, conjures a world of shadows and steam that perfectly evokes the noirish gloom of James O’Barr’s graphic novel. Like its hero, the film’s haunting and also haunted: a gripping waking nightmare.

24. Black Panther (2018)

Chadwick Boseman in Black Panther - Matt Kennedy

The 18th instalment in the Marvel saga finally gave Afrofuturism – an approach to science fiction and fantasy grounded in black experience and the cultures of the African continent – its blockbuster due, with the expensive end of the sci-fi film business always having been, previously, monomaniacally white. Directed stylishly by Ryan Coogler, and with magisterially imagined production and costume design, Black Panther makes you rue that it took this long for a studio to try it.

Set in Wakanda, a fictional east African country, the plot bridges the gap between 2016’s Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War (2018). It takes in the coronation of Wakanda’s King T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), and a dormant threat to his kingdom that’s consequently shaken awake (in the form of Michael B Jordan’s vengeful, power-hungry exile, and Andy Serkis’s avaricious arms dealer). There’s many widely judged moments of performance here from a wildly appealing ensemble cast (Lupita Nyong’o, Letitia Wright and Daniel Kaluuya, for starters), and seeing the late Boseman in action now – he died of colon cancer in 2020 at the painfully young age of 43 – feels bittersweet.

23. Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Cate Blanchett in Thor: Ragnarok - Film Stills

Much of Thor: Ragnarok’s charm lies in watching the characters bounce off each other, verbally and physically, when they could be making themselves useful. Childish is one word for it, and more of a compliment than it might at first sound – particularly as the film’s oddly beautiful scuffed-plastic aesthetic gives it the look of a 1980s action play-set come to life. Taika Waititi becomes one of the rare Marvel directors to be allowed free reign with his vision, turning in one of the loudest, brightest and enjoyably camp entries in the Marvel universe.

22. X-Men 2 (2003)

Patrick Stewart in X Men 2 - Film Stills

Although Bryan Singer’s reputation has been tarnished in recent years, his opening salvo in the X-Men franchise was seriously impressive. But the 2003 sequel elevates what came before it, resulting in a film that’s among the most emotionally alive on this entire list. The overarching allegory about being true to oneself is summed up in a tender, funny-sad scene in which Shawn Ashmore’s Iceman “comes out” as a mutant to his parents (Mum: “Have you tried…not being a mutant?”). It’s just as memorable as the spectacular opening set piece in which the White House is infiltrated by Alan Cumming’s demonic Nightcrawler.

21. Unbreakable (2000)

Bruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson in Unbreakable - Film Stills

Mere months after X-Men re-energised the entire genre, an M Night Shyamalan film was released that found a very different, equally meaningful way to trace a classic superhero story arc. Bruce Willis’s troubled security guard develops superhuman traits, which Samuel L Jackson’s obsessive fan insists are rooted in comic-book lore. It remains Shyamalan’s richest, most fully realised film, and a sharp consideration of the hard-wired human need for heroism, super or otherwise.

20. Logan (2017)

Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine

Why do so many superhero films sold as “for mature audiences” feel like they’re meant for exactly the opposite? Whatever the reason, this emphatically isn’t the case with Logan, the third – and by a significant margin, best – lone outing for Hugh Jackman’s well-knit and whiskery mutant. You might assume James Mangold’s film is meant as a sequel to the two other solo Wolverine pictures, 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine and 2013’s The Wolverine. But watching it, you’re struck by the thought that it could be set in a world in which those earlier films were just films – and this paranoid, punishingly violent noir western is the real, shotgun-toting, limb-lopping deal.

Logan’s plot pushes its titular hero out into the (largely rural) America of this near future, with a young girl called Laura (Dafne Keen), the first new mutant to surface in 25 years, under his protection. That premise suggests the sinuous science-fiction of Children of Men, though the film owes far more to early John Carpenter – both in its snaps of shock-and-awe brutality and Mangold’s nerve-stiffening composition and framing.

19. X-Men: First Class (2011)

Caleb Landry Jones, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Rose Byrne, Nicholas Hoult, James McAvoy and Lucas Till in X-Men: First Class - Murray Close/Film Stills

Matthew Vaughn’s Sixties-set prequel to the then-floundering X-Men franchise reminded cinemagoers why they’d fallen in love with the troupe of super-mutants in the first place. From its loopy period trim (the sets and costumes are worthy of Connery-era Bond) to the history-bending storyline and cool camaraderie of its niftily selected cast, the whole thing ripples with wit. Few blockbusters with ambitions so expansive feel this light on their feet.

18. The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm in The Fantastic Four: First Steps - Marvel Studios

After 2019’s Avengers: Endgame tied up Marvel’s first decade of cinematic universe-building with a swagger, many wondered what the studio could possibly do to follow it up. Agonisingly, the answer proved to be nothing – and six long years of creative torpor set in, as the studio frantically threw sequels and series into the multiverse blender to see what might stick. None of it did – until the arrival of this slate-clearing relaunch of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s ‘first family’ of super-heroism, which gave the MCU its most exciting, moving and overall complete-feeling film in at least a decade.

Set in a retro-styled atomic-age Manhattan, it swapped the increasingly threadbare postmodern snark and digitised bluster that had been Marvel’s house style for heartfelt, human storytelling, while embracing the bright, optimistic tone of the most current pop-cinema trends. Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn shine as the titular quartet, whose quest to save the Earth from the appetites of Ralph Ineson’s Galactus (aided by Julia Garner’s Silver Surfer) honours the cosmic pizazz of the original comic-book adventures. The plot sticks to established formula, but director Matt Shakman crucially gives his cast space to create the sort of natural, found-in-the-moment chemistry which makes the crunchy, bangy bits count.

17. Wonder Woman (2017)

Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman - Clay Enos/Film Stills

Wonder Woman is close to a knockout on its own ambitious terms. Patty Jenkins’s film officially belongs to the DC Extended Universe, the same sunless and woebegone realm that brought us Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad. But Jenkins – whose only other feature to date is the 2003 Charlize Theron showcase Monster – seems uninterested in cameos and cross-promotion, and devotes every ounce of energy to the story at hand. In a genre where fanboy entitlement regularly calls the tune, Wonder Woman’s feminism – in its eagerly daubed poster-paint strokes – feels like a rarity.

16. Iron Man 3 (2013)

Robert Downey Jr in Iron Man 3 - Zade Rosenthal/Handout

As the seventh title in Marvel’s ongoing Cinematic Universe, and first official entry in its “second phase”, Iron Man 3 had to shake things up. It did, and gloriously so, largely thanks to writer-director Shane Black, who colours crazily outside the genre’s established lines, while also harking back to the Eighties and Nineties buddy action movies on which he built his career. Black knows his leading man, Robert Downey Jr, performs better outside his metal suit than in it, so conspires to separate the two at every given opportunity. It’s a risky creative choice that pays off perfectly: it’s a winking, swaggering pleasure to spend this much time with the man behind the iron mask.

15. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

While the live-action films veered off into fluorescent camp, Warner Bros’ superb Batman animated series stood firm with the then-unfashionable film-noir glint of the original DC comic books. This feature-length spin-off could hardly have been more ambitious, introducing an entirely new villain as its main antagonist (although Mark Hamill makes a welcome return as the voice of the Joker), and riffing on source material as substantial as A Christmas Carol and Citizen Kane.

14. Superman (2025)

David Corenswet as Clark Kent/Superman

Perhaps it was Superman’s air of default-ness that made him increasingly tricky to adapt for the big screen as comic-book movies became more commonplace. With all these other heroes and heroines all over the place, why was this guy still special? But one of the masterstrokes of James Gunn’s bright, buoyant reboot was to embrace super-heroic ubiquity: its amiable spin on the character, played by David Corenswet, often found himself mitigating the carnage about to be wrought by his more careless peers, or sitting out crises entirely to wrestle with his role in a world in which concepts like right and wrong no longer felt so clear-cut. What’s more, special powers were no longer treated as a burden – a very Noughties concept – but a privilege.

The playful little barrel roll Corenswet pulls off on his opening return flight from his Antarctic base to Metropolis might be the most important shot in the film, because after years of brooding and smart-alecky truculence, here was a hero who looked like he actually wanted to save the day, and even saw an objective value in doing so. Its avalanche of ideas – each one used up fully and gleefully – threw some critics who’d become used to the forever-tease of the Marvel business model. But here you didn’t leave the cinema wondering if a Mister Terrific spin-off was coming, because he’d already been used so perfectly here. Gunn’s film breathed new life into a burnt-out genre – and at just about the last viable moment.

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13. Batman Returns (1992)

Batman Returns: Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Keaton - Film Stills

Even the higher entries on this list are short on sensuality: super-heroic bodies, buff though they may be, typically prefer to be admired from a distance. The glorious exception to the rule, though is Tim Burton’s sublimely slinky second Batman film, which teased out the genre’s fetishy subcurrents at what now feels like the last moment it could have got away with it.

Its not-so-secret weapon was Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman – an adolescence-defining vision in wet-look latex, and capable romantic foil for Michael Keaton’s crime-fighting socialite. Like all of Burton’s best work, Batman Returns is a monster movie at heart, and its heroes and villains – the above two, plus Danny DeVito’s slippery, flippery Penguin – are as much kindred spirits as they are nemeses, confined to the shadows of a city that itself vampirically preys on its citizens. (No wonder Christopher Walken’s scheming industrialist, Max Shreck, was named after the star of Murnau’s Nosferatu.)

12. Spider-Man 2 (2004)

Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 2 - United Archives GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo

Sony Pictures has struggled to make sense of Spider-Man on film (not that you can tell from the box-office figures), but there’s no question that the second of Sam Raimi’s films, released in 2004, was the sweet spot. Raimi’s love of carnival swoops through every shot – this is the superhero as trapeze artist – but Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst keep the story grounded, while in Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, the franchise has its most complex and scariest villain.

11. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse - Sony Pictures Animation

From the creators of The Lego Movie, this animated addition to the Spider-Man universe is a breath of fresh air amidst endless live-action Marvel sequels. Instead of Peter Parker, we focus here on Miles Morales, a new character created in 2011. He’s a black-Hispanic teen, living in New York City, and one of Marvel’s most appealing heroes: a soulful graphic design nerd finding his place in the world. Bitten by a spider while graffiti-tagging an off-limits section of subway, Miles gains all the same powers as Peter (confusing them initially for some particularly humiliating phase of puberty). This is where the “Spider-Verse” concept comes in. Miles soon teams up with the other Spider-Man, who beams in from another dimension along with various other Spider-adjacent heroes (like Hailee Steinfeld’s Gwen Stacy-turned-Spider-Girl) from other dimensions too, for a web-slinging adventure of his own.

It’s the craft that’s out of this world – the animators have laboured gloriously to replicate the look and feel of the original comics, creating never-better New York cityscapes. With a zippy plot to boot, it’s manic, dimension-hopping fun, remarkably never doing your head in with all this whiz-bam-blap, but rather getting the wildness just right.

10. Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)

Zack Snyder's Justice League - Warner Bros/Film Stills

The course wasn’t smooth for director Zack Snyder’s DC superhero franchise for Warner Bros. Of the five films he wanted to make, the series only ended up having three: a Superman reboot; a poorly received Batman/Superman follow-up; and Justice League, which saw four other DC heroes join Batman and Superman. Justice League (2017) disintegrated mid-shoot – creative tussles with the studio, and personal tragedy for Snyder saw Marvel alumnus Joss Whedon take over, creating a film that was barely watchable.

But with a new streaming platform to plug, Warner Bros coughed up the cash for this second version of Justice League, in line with Snyder’s original vision – and the result is this mad, magnificent four-hour apocalyptic pop epic, which feels as good as the Hollywood comic-book blockbuster is ever going to get. Only sharing a vague shape and a few specific scenes with its predecessor, this tale of the formation of the League and their fight to prevent a cast of foes from destroying the planet hits differently to Whedon’s take. With characters of real grit and depth, and some of the most spectacular action sequences the genre has ever seen, it’s truly exceptional.

9. Superman: The Movie (1978)

“You’ll believe a man can fly.” Richard Donner’s Superman wasn’t quite the first live-action superhero feature (it’s predated by a couple of theatrical spin-offs from the Superman and Batman TV series, plus a handful of made-for-television projects), but its famous tagline captures the unique pleasure of spectacle cinema – the way the films themselves seem to resist gravity, rushing their heroes up into thin air and carrying us along with them.

Making the film took five agonising years. But the release surpassed Warner Bros’s wildest dreams: in 1978, only Grease outgrossed it. Christopher Reeve was one of more than 200 who auditioned for the title role, to which it’s now impossible to imagine any other actor being better suited. The blue eyes, the square jaw, the kiss-curl: he’s a dead ringer for the comic-book icon. But it’s the way Reeve breathes humanity, humour, even modesty into the character that makes this most alien of super-beings a hero his audience can relate to.

8. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

Hellboy II: The Golden Army - Egon/Film Stills

Carnivorous tooth-fairies, giant, tentacled plants, spindly revenants with heads like cathedrals: it never takes too long to work out when you’re in a Guillermo del Toro film. Though it’s based on a Mike Mignola comic, Hellboy II is a Del Toro Thoroughbred: a feast of splashy action and multi-coloured creatures, with space-time-spanning influences from HP Lovecraft and the Universal monsters to wuxia and anime, with a little Arthur Rackham mixed in.

7. The Batman (2022)

The Batman: Zoë Kravitz and Robert Pattinson - Jonathan Olley/Film Stills

After five live-action Batman adaptations since 1989, you’d be forgiven for wondering if there was any point in a sixth. But director Matt Reeves, of Planet of the Apes fame, came up with a corker of an angle: make it a detective thriller, with the intricate red-wool-on-corkboard plotting of classic film noir. Robert Pattinson plays young, reclusive Bruce, embroiled in his self-titled “Gotham Project” – fighting low-level street crime by night, whilst also serving as an informal private-eye partner to Jeffrey Wright’s detective on the Gotham police force. One evening, they investigate a murder: the work of the Riddler (Paul Dano), a chillingly plausible incel type.

The underworld mystery plot that begins to unravel thereafter climaxes (with dark brilliance from Reeves) in rioting, terror and bloody insurrection on election night. Given recent US history, and rendered with a strikingly un-green-screened look, it all seems rather too real. The film is buttressed by a deep bench of tremendous character performances – including Zoë Kravitz’s Catwoman, a drug dealer and hostess at a nightclub with mob ties. Pattinson and Kravitz together generate more sensual charge than entire franchises have been known to muster.

6. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse - Sony Pictures Animation

Faster, wilder, stranger, bolder. If the first part of the Spider-Verse trilogy tested the limits of what was possible in the fields of super-heroism and CG animation alike, this astonishing follow-up tore through them into uncharted space. Its frenzy of contrasting styles mixed in ways that simultaneously looked and felt intuitive and impossible. Crisp graphic comic art met expressionistic colour washes, Syd Mead futurism, punky collage and scribbly freehand extravagance. That its hero was Spider-Man was now almost incidental.

Rather than sifting through existing lore, the film made its own from scratch – via a storyline whose metaphysical daring had more in common with classic anime than the fiddly universe-building of its live-action peers. It isn’t overstating things to say that both Across the Spider-Verse and its predecessor changed what was possible in Hollywood animation. That it might yet go on to do the same for Marvel movies we can only hope.

5. Superman II (1980)

Christopher Reeve in Superman II - Alamy

It feels odd to say ‘of course, you couldn’t get away with this nowadays’ about a PG-rated Superman sequel shot back-to-back with its predecessor in the late 1970s. But the sheer, joyous freedom with which director Richard Lester approached this assignment – especially given his late arrival, halfway through the shoot, after his predecessor Richard Donner was abruptly dismissed by producers – is what makes Christopher Reeve’s second stint as the Man of Steel feel like a blast from a sunnier past.

This was long before superhero films began to behave like a genre in their own right – so Superman II can be half phoney-honeymoon screwball comedy and half atomic-age sci-fi extravaganza (see: Terence Stamp and his cronies striding through small town America while dressed as if en route to the Berlin nightclub Berghain), while stopping at nothing in its mission to delight. (Even the climactic battle in downtown Metropolis is stippled with slapstick vignettes.)

At the heart of it all is Reeve’s utterly disarming lead turn and gorgeously fumbly chemistry with Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane: Reeve later revealed he’d patterned his performance after Cary Grant’s own screwball work, which was arguably the masterstroke that made everything else click. Across big screens and small, Reeve is widely considered the best Superman of the lot, but perhaps that’s because he was – more importantly – the perfect Clark Kent.

4. Batman (1989)

Jack Nicholson's Joker in Batman - Landmark Media/Alamy Stock Photo

You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight? Superman may have been the first true modern-day superhero film, but it was Tim Burton’s vertiginously brilliant Batman that gave us our initial midnight glimpse of the superhero phenomenon in action. Given that the film was reportedly interfered with at every step by an understandably nervous Warner Bros, and was subject to on-set rewrites and a furious fan protest (50,000 angry letters were sent to the studio over Michael Keaton’s casting), it’s doubly impressive that what stands out 25 years on is its singularity of vision.

Burton’s Batman carries itself like one of Warner Bros’s own great 1930s gangster pictures, while drawing images and ideas from filmmakers as diverse (and unlikely) as Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Wiene, Fritz Lang and Georges Franju. Straight action sequences are few and far between, and the thrills come through performance – both the roiling emotional undercurrents we see in Keaton’s Bruce Wayne and the flamboyant sadism of Jack Nicholson’s Joker. If few superhero movies since have roamed so far off-piste, perhaps it’s because Burton was working at a time when the genre’s rules had yet to become ingrained.

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3. The Incredibles (2004)

The Incredibles - Film Stills

At the height of Pixar’s creative heyday, it makes perfect sense for that animation studio to look for inspiration to another golden age – that of American comic books – and ponder what might have happened when its superstars decided to settle down and start families, while their Lycra grew a little snugger by the week.

Enter Bob and Helen Parr, former costumed crimefighters now living an average family life on a kind of protection programme for the differently powered. Of course, there’s a crisis and the Parrs are forced to save the day, but the film’s brilliance rests in the way writer-director Brad Bird weaves painfully recognisable concerns through the cartoon chaos: the work that goes into keeping a marriage alive, the fear of not mattering, the double-edged swords of compromise and fitting in. “If everyone’s super, no one will be,” broods the bad guy at one point, which led some to wonder if the Pixar story trust had been huffing Nietzsche. In fact, its real moral is about potential and making the most of it; with this film, Pixar did just that.

2. The Dark Knight (2008)

Heath Ledger and Christian Bale in The Dark Knight - Film Stills

To watch terror gnaw on the 21st century’s bones, see The Dark Knight. The centrepiece of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy stretched higher than any superhero film before it, and the feelings of vertigo it tended to induce were only partly thanks to the Imax photography.

In Heath Ledger’s Joker, Nolan’s film has a supervillain whose motives and background and plans remain shrouded in mystery, perhaps even unintelligible; but whose face, sweaty and scarred and caked in pan-stick, is instantly recognisable, seemingly omnipresent – the Coca-Cola of fear. Every action set-piece moves with irresistible physical momentum: the truck-flip, the bike-spin and the hospital bomb are indelible, classic sequences of action cinema. But in fact, the film peaks in one of its smallest scenes, when it puts Batman and the Joker face-to-face in the same small interrogation room, where they’re finally revealed as fractured mirror-images of one another; two converse faces of chaos in a world that had long ago bid goodbye to order.

1. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Christian Bale as Batman in The Dark Knight Rises - Ron Phillips/Film Stills

While the second entry in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is probably, on balance, the superior piece of film-making, its gargantuan final act is even more vitally keyed into the concept of super-heroism: what it means, why it matters, the way symbols endure while human beings fade, and how the sign of a bat, chalked hurriedly on a street corner in troubled times, can somehow be a galvanising force and a rallying cry.

Nolan’s images and themes come ripped from current affairs, classic novels like A Tale of Two Cities and Doctor Zhivago, and great silent-cinema epics by Lang and Eisenstein, but the film isn’t an apologia for the superhero genre, or an attempt to upgrade it to respectable art. The respectability and the artistry are assumed from the start; the rest simply falls into place. Quite simply, Nolan’s film is the übermensch of the supermen genre. It obliterates everything else on this list through sheer force of will.

With contributions by Tim Robey

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