The Wolverine (2013)

The Wolverine boasts one of the best pulp-inspired scripts yet. It’s still full of corny dialogue...but there’s a genuine elegance to the way it establishes Logan’s tortured condition and slowly brings the character around to recovering his heroic potential, methodically setting up and paying off ideas as it unfolds.

Now here’s a comic-book movie. In a summer that’s delivered one overstuffed Phase Two sequel and a bloated reboot designed to establish a whole new universe of interconnected franchises, The Wolverine has a self-contained efficiency that’s hard to resist.

This Wolverine gets our hopes up, and falls short.

This may be the year's best superhero movie because, for a sufficient amount of time, it doesn't feel like a superhero movie at all.

It’s a step up from the garbled silliness of Wolverine’s first solo outing. Unlike Origins, the storytelling is more sharply focused here, ignited by flashes of stylised superheroism.