Every Marvel Comic Book Movie Ranked From Worst To Best

21. X-Men: First Class

Buoyed by a phenomenally talented cast, Matthew Vaughn's reboot/prequel has some brilliant ideas that actually could have worked as stand-alone movies, like the Nazi hunting Magneto - that would have been X-Men Origins: Magneto if Wolverine didn't tank - and the excellent Hellfire Club, led by a delightfully evil Kevin Bacon. And it's almost a great sum of its impressive parts.

The nostalgic spirit is mostly very good, but some of the character designs let it down - I'll never be convinced in either Mystique or Beast's blue looks in this timeline - and Jennifer Lawrence gets away with being fairly wooden next to far superior cast-mates.

The best of the film comes in the shape of its script, the climactic scenes and how the X-Men team is built up, and it helps hugely that Fox found an excellent central pair to replace Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender.