HOLLYWOOD, CA – MAY 25: Director Patty Jenkins and actors Gal Gadot and Chris Pine attend the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “Wonder Woman” at the Pantages Theatre on May 25, 2017 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)
Whether or not you plan to spend a long weekend with heroes or just need some suggestions to fill the summer days, here are essential superhero flicks.
Summer is not the only time that you can settle in and catch up on movies that you’ve missed — or revisit some favorites — but it certainly feels like one of the best times. Summer is the time of leaving work a little early, flopping onto the couch, and enjoying something that’s maybe not totally intellectual but still asks you to think a little bit about what’s going on.
Enter the superhero movie.
But there are, well, a lot of hero movies out there. Do you want to settle for mediocrity, or go in knowing that you’re almost certainly going to have a good time with the following seven movies? If the latter, then read on.
Wonder Woman
If your summer needs a little inspiration, look no further than Diana, Princess of Themyscira, journeying to man’s world, and making sure that everyone knows she’s the undisputed protagonist. Yours truly has written about the film’s use of different palettes to show different parts of the story, but it goes beyond just color — the movie is simply gorgeous on all fronts.
From learning more about her true origins to discovering that hero work isn’t as easy as it seems, Wonder Woman is the kind of movie that will have you ready to stride out into your own personal no-man’s-land and come out the other side still feeling heroic.
Wonder Woman is currently available with an HBO subscription.
Logan
The saga of the X-Men franchise on film is a long one, stretching back nearly 20 years at this point. But when looking at all the films, only one stands out as a huge contribution to redefining the types of stories a superhero movie can do (because let’s face it, the X-Men movies were mostly gutsy just by existing in the early 2000s).
That movie is Logan. But aside from that, this movie is a chance to appreciate the culmination of two decades’ worth of work for both Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman as their respective characters, while also making sure we know who Dafne Keen is.
Like Wonder Woman, Logan is available with an HBO subscription.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Set aside your Avengers and your Civil Wars. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is still easily in the mix for the best Marvel Cinematic Universe movie out there — and two of the more recent entries are on this list, worry not.
It takes a hard look at what might happen if your friend is on the opposite side of you several years before Civil War did the same thing, and there’s a lot of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes if you ship those two … and if you don’t ship them, then they just have a really nice friendship that goes through some very big struggles in this movie.
So long as you have an FX subscription, you can watch it there; otherwise, it’s available for rental on Amazon.