Critics assemble! Here’s my list of the greatest superhero movies of all time

Putting together a Top 10 list of the best superhero movies of all time may just be the critical equivalent of trying to herd thunder through a spreadsheet. Are we rating the best-made movie, the most influential or the most emotionally ruinous? The genre has exploded over the past 20 years to the point where it long ago swallowed cinema whole: we have crime sagas (most Batman flicks), family comedies (The Incredibles, Guardians of the Galaxy), cultural and political allegories (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, X-Men, Black Panther), pop-art fever dreams (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) and even tales of Wagnerian apocalypse (Watchmen, Avengers: Infinity War).

The sense is that these movies are too varied, the emotional criteria too slippery, the personal attachments some of us have to them too embarrassingly primal, to be placed in a clear hierarchy. Is the No 1 comic book movie of all time the film that made fangirls and boys whimper into their crumpled copies of Amazing Fantasy #15? In which case we might be looking at Spider-Man: No Way Home. Or is it the picture that’s so good it appeals to filmgoers who don’t actually like superhero flicks? That would be The Dark Knight. Is Matt Reeves’ gloriously offbeat, Fincher-esque The Batman too weird and languid to make the list? And does Patty Jenkins’ breezily old-fashioned Wonder Woman get downgraded because it was part of a superhero universe that ultimately tanked?

The original and best? … Christopher Reeve in the 1978 version of Superman. Photograph: Cinetext Bildarchiv/Warner Bros./Allstar

And there is “influence” to consider. Films like Richard Donner’s 1978 version of Superman should surely get in there for convincing Hollywood audiences that not only could a man fly, but, also more importantly, that they really ought to pay to watch him do it for the next half century. Likewise, Iron Man deserves points not merely for launching a franchise, but for redrawing the grammar of the modern blockbuster so thoroughly.

What about the films that leave a scar? Superhero cinema may be uniquely gifted at providing catharsis, but only a handful of movies conjure up genuine emotional ruin. Here Logan enters the conversation: a superhero western so bruised, mournful and unsentimental that it seemed less interested in saving the world than in asking what happens when a myth realises it isn’t getting any younger. If the genre is usually built on fantasies of invincibility, James Mangold’s film found greatness in the opposite impulse, turning Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine into a grizzled relic of violence.

And then there is event status, the awkward modern category in which a film’s greatness cannot be disentangled from the social ritual of seeing it. Superhero cinema may now be the only genre in which audience reaction can feel like part of the film itself. Nowhere was that clearer than in Avengers: Endgame, whose opening weekend transformed multiplexes into revival tents full of cheering, gasping, whooping and hollering. A colder analysis might punish it for depending on a decade of homework, but can a list of the greatest really ignore the one film that turned collective anticipation into a once-in-a-generation sacrament?

What category award would you give to films like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse? Best sensory overclock? Most impressive electric shock to the optic nerve? An annual “bloody hell, cinema can still do that” gong? Either way, the Oscar-winning animation looked like comic-book ink had finally achieved sentience.

‘Simply a revelation’ … Danai Gurira, Lupita Nyong’o and Florence Kasumba in Black Panther. Photograph: null/Marvel Studios/Disney/Allstar

Finally, there’s cultural impact. Black Panther was simply a revelation, a modern myth that convinced the more po-faced critics to stop writing about capes as if they were simply latex and VFX, as well as remoulding the idea who blockbuster fantasy “belonged to”. If we all thought the centre of the superhero universe was Batman, Superman and Spider-Man, Ryan Coogler’s film proved that there ought to be a more nuanced conversation going on about race, identity, heritage and the intriguing question of where the mainstream imaginative centre actually lies.