The best superhero movies of all time

At just a bit over three hours, Avengers: Endgame is long, it’s crowded, and every bit of it feels perfect. Endgame is the triumphant culmination of the MCU’s Infinity Saga, featuring the final battle between just about every surviving superhero to ever appear in Marvel Studio’s films and the nihilistic madman Thanos (Josh Brolin). Most of the film involves a fun, nostalgic time heist, visiting different past moments in the series. It all leads to the insanely massive battle involving Thanos and his alien armies, the Avengers, the Asgardians, the Ravagers, the Guardians, the wizards of Kamar-taj, and even — just for a split second — none other than Howard the Duck. It’s funny, emotionally powerful, and obscenely huge — which is exactly what it should be.

There is an argument to be made that Joker doesn’t belong anywhere on a list of superhero movies. Even director Todd Phillips told Empire Magazine that he didn’t see his film as a comic book movie. But the story unfolds in Gotham City, Bruce Wayne and his parents are in it, and the protagonist evolves into perhaps the most iconic supervillain in all pop culture. So, you know, we feel pretty confident including it. There are plenty of valid criticisms of Joker, including its depictions of mental illness and race, plus the cinematic conversation it has with films like The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver, which some argue misses the mark of homage and simply steals unapologetically. And when it was released, many questioned the timing, as it came in the wake of several mass shootings committed in the U.S. — some feel that perhaps that wasn’t the time to glorify an antihero like Arthur Fleck.But in terms of a movie that does find itself in the superhero neighborhood whether Phillips likes it or not, what Joker does better than any other film is show us exactly how someone could shed their humanity to become a supervillain. Sure, we’ve had plenty of sympathetic supervillains before, like Tom Hiddleston’s Loki and Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger, but in Joker, we see the process unfold. We see Fleck transform into a monster, and we see it in a world just like our own that has nothing to do with rainbow bridges or vibranium meteorites.

If you were to watch Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight without knowing anything beforehand about the cast or the plot, you would not recognize Heath Ledger as the Joker. His transformation into Batman’s clown-faced nemesis is just that good. He was so committed to the role he insisted co-star Christian Bale hit him for real in their amazing interrogation room scene, and it’s that commitment and Ledger’s talent that makes him the best reason to watch The Dark Knight. He’s so good that Aaron Eckhart’s equally dark transformation from hero District Attorney Harvey Dent into the monstrous Two-Face is often forgotten in discussions of what is unquestionably the best of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.