The best superhero movie ever made, hands-down. It has the good sense to embrace the brightly-colored melodrama of comic books and then pushes it into a new space off to the side — the fusion of vivid printer’s ink and madcap sloganeering. The film is in on the joke, but no one inside it is — everyone accepts this insane world on its own terms, propelling it even further into the red, white and blue abyss. All this and it’s funny as hell, too — it never lifts its veil of farcical, hyperbroad comedy, even while plunging daggers at America’s military-industrial potbelly. “I was born poor, yeah. My father worked in the sewers. Then the Depression came — and they closed down the sewers!” The key moment in all of this is the sequence at the U.S. Embassy, where the absurdism begins an acceleration into supernova.