Deadpool

The line between Ryan Reynolds the actor and Deadpool the character seems to become ever-more narrow. It’s hard not to suspect he wears the suit around the house, given how often it appears in the star’s TikToks and promos, and how Reynolds seems to have used it to exorcize all manner of aspects of his acting life. But before 2016, the association between actor and comic book antihero was an outstandingly negative one: the disastrous Origins: Wolverine, that’s very lucky not to be at the bottom of this list.

Deadpool changed all that, so damn fast. Having been worked on for years by Reynolds and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, then later joined by director Tim Miller, the film became a labor of love, and somehow escaped the studio interference that would usually flatten a project this outlandish and extreme.

The movie is rightly celebrated for its fourth-wall-breaking nature, and the meta-commentary on both superhero cinema and its own intense violence and profanity, but if it were only that, it wouldn’t be this high on the list. It’s also a film with pathos, with integrity, and with characters who feel grounded in a reality that its plot is not entitled to. It’s also a damn fine story, and shot with the same visual flair Tim Miller brings to his incredible Love, Death & Robots animations. Oh, and it’s ludicrously funny. — John Walker