Thor: Ragnarok

The stars aligned for this one. We know that now, after the dull thud of Thor: Love And Thunder. That or the writing team of Craig Kyle and Christopher L. Yost was utterly vital to Ragnarok’s incredible success—neither returned for the Taika Waititi-penned follow-up, although he directed both movies. Where Love And Thunder was a misfiring joke machine, putting plot behind a desire to just endlessly show off, Ragnarok was a dense, engrossing tale that couldn’t help but leak squillions of top-quality gags.

The stakes are incredibly high in a film that sees the loss of an entire homeworld, all while juggling the myriad of arcs from within the MCU in a way that somehow made sense. The extremes were a joy to be flung between, from an Earthly, dying Odin and the imminent release of Hela, to the camp pantomime lunacy of Thor and Hulk battling on the garbage planet Sakaar for the entertainment of Jeff Goldblum’s adorably awful Grandmaster.

This is also the movie that best handles the flip-flopping love/hate relationship between Thor and Loki, in which the inevitability of Loki’s betrayals is not something for the audience to sigh at as they see them coming but rather is integral to the plot.

Perhaps more than anything else, Ragnarok is a collection of wonderful performances. Hemsworth finds the perfect pitch for Thor’s vanity and heroism, Hiddleston is gleeful as Loki, Goldblum is the most gloriously Goldblum he’s ever been, and Cate Blanchett is just fucking incredible as the villainous Hela, the scene-chewingly wicked Disney witch Angelina Jolie wishes she could be. It’s a movie that, despite being a cog in the infinite MCU machine, works brilliantly as a standalone action comedy in its own right. —John Walker