There's been two Spider-Mans, Batmans and Supermans apiece since the first X-Men movie, yet remarkably the mutants have managed to make it thus far without having to overtly reboot the whole thing; this year's X-Men: Days Of Future Past brought back many of the original cast from fourteen years ago. It's something of a marvel that the human-mutant divide can still feel fresh. Sure, along the way there's been alternate narrative directions taken (First Class was a soft reboot that's been further meshed into continuity here) and characters that were previous supporting players have become focal series characters (what do expect when you cast Jennifer Lawrence?), but this is still very much the same mutant band that kick-started the genre. Bryan Singer returned to the franchise he helped birth back in 2000 and delivers the best X-Men movie to date (don't worry X2 - you're a close second). There's a great a balance of backward-looking reverence and wide-eyed excitement for the future, but what really makes it work so well is the closed, tightly-plotted narrative that marks it out as a great time-travel movie in its own right. For fans of X-Men, this stands as the boldest movie in the franchise, resolutely writing the despised X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine out of continuity. For those less sold there is a lot that will go overhead, but objectively amazing scenes (Quicksilver's kitchen sequence can't be overstated) mean there's still a lot to love in the best superhero movie of the year.
