5. X-Men: First Class

When things seemed darkest for the X-Men movies franchise, director Matthew Vaughn shone a light with X-Men: First Class, a prequel film that took many fans by surprise.

X-Men: First Class was set in the 1960s, the same decade that the X-Men were created, and told the story of how Professor X and Magneto first met. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender play the young mutant leaders and have enough chemistry to carry the rest of the film, which is a bit weaker.

January Jones fails to do Emma Frost justice, the most of the actual first class of X-Men and the Hellfire Club are treated like power sets to fill out the fight scenes more than actual characters and the decisions to kill Darwin and have Angel turn villain midway through the movie still feel poorly made.

That said, X-Men: First Class remains the brightest and most stylistically distinct of the core X-Men films.

4. X2: X-Men United

Dumb title aside, X2: X-Men United did what a good superhero sequel should do by expanding on the things that made the original X-Men successful and expanding on it, both literally in terms of the cast of characters and in terms of the scope of the world they live in.

With a plot loosely inspired by the classic X-Men graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills, the film introduces one of the X-Men's greatest enemies, humanity. William Stryker is not a supervillain god, he's a man with distinct ties to Wolverine, which makes him a much more interesting villain.

The movie also introduces Nightcrawler with an opening action sequence that remains one of the franchise's best.

3. X-Men: Days Of Future Past

X-Men: Days of Future Past was something truly special. Never before in a superhero movie have two separate casts of a movie franchise come together for a film like this.

The X-Men franchise was uniquely suited to doing so since time travel has long been part of its narrative DNA, beginning with the classic "Days of Future Past" story on which the film is based.

Bringing to together the cast of X-Men: First Class with the cast of the original X-Men trilogy, even if they were separated in time, allowed for a true passing of the torch for the X-Men franchise, and the team fights against the Sentinels in the future were a high point for the franchise, thanks largely to the creative use of Blink's powers.

2. Logan

Hugh Jackman has been the heart of the X-Men movies franchise for 17 years, playing Wolverine nine times in total. Logan proved to be an incredible, moving sendoff to a superhero movie icon.

Taking place in the near future and accepting an R rating meant that Logan was able to go to darker places than the main X-Men franchise. The fight scenes are brutal, the performances from Jackman and Stewart are excellent, and the introduction of Dafne Keen as X-23 is a very welcome one.

There's some argument that the final act of Logan doesn't quite measure up to the first two, but that's quite a high bar. Logan is a movie that superhero fans are going to be talking about for a long time to come.

1. Deadpool

Deadpool is something of a Cinderella story for the X-Men movies franchise. The film was originally planned as a follow-up to X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but the studio got skittish after fans reacted so negatively to the first Wolverine solo film.

Flash forward several years to someone leaking the test footage and you get a positive reaction from fans strong enough for Fox to quickly greenlight the Deadpool movie. When it was finally released, Deadpool proved to be everything fans had been hoping for: funny, irreverent, raunchy, and action-packed.

No other X-Men film, maybe even no other superhero film, has so successfully infused a movie with the energy of its main character, and that energy remains at a constant high throughout the entire film.

Now Deadpool is practically a mini-franchise unto itself and will be a big part of the X-Men movies franchise going forward.