Every Marvel Comic Book Movie Ranked From Worst To Best

11. X-Men: Days Of Future Past

Forcing two different timelines of the same movie franchise together should never produce anything like positive results, so when Bryan Singer came back to the X-Men series after Matthew Vaughn rescued it with First Class, there was no way his plan to do Days Of Future Past could possibly work.

The cast would be too big, the performances too wildly different to mesh and the timeline so convoluted that a coherent narrative would be impossible. But astonishingly, it worked and Singer managed to transform one of X-Men comics' most brilliant but also most taxing comic book arcs into a truly great film.

Days Of Future Past is a picture of perfect balance, taking a huge number of working parts and directing them into a pristine narrative machine that even has space for new characters and exhilarating set-pieces. That the film managed to find that control is testament to how brilliant Bryan Singer's work was on it.

Hugh Jackman and James McAvoy are particularly great, Peter Dinklage is thoroughly unlikeable and Evan Peters' Quicksilver is a revelation, but even more than the performances, the film thrives because of its story-telling. The stakes feel real, the drama is claustrophobic and there is a personal element that defies the huge scale of the project. That contradictory intimacy is chiefly why it all works.