The Essentials: The Films Of Bryan Singer Ranked

8. “X-Men Apocalypse” (2016)
If “X-Men: Days Of Future Past,” looked like a hot mess from a distance and proved to be surprisingly engaging for the most part, its follow-up “Apocalypse” looked like a hot mess from a distance and proved to be exactly that, getting wrong so much of what its predecessor got right, and in a year already gluttonous with superheroes, may have proven to be one film too many. Released just two years after “Days Of Future Past” but set a decade later (though with the cast entirely unaged: the chronology of the X-Men franchise has always been a baffling thing), it sees ancient immortal villain En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac, entirely wasted but hopefully cashing a decent paycheck) rising after a thousand year nap, gathering four ‘horsemen’ followers including Magneto (Michael Fassbender), and only the X-Men, including a few new recruits (Tye Sheridan as Cyclops, Sophie Turner as Jean Grey, Kodi Smit-McPhee as Nightcrawler) can stop him from destroying the world. Simon Kinberg’s script feels like a collection of events rather than a real story more often than not: it’s a busy film, but for all its world-ending stakes (done through some really unimaginative CGI destruction that quickly causes your eyes to glaze over), it rarely engages in the way that the best of the franchise has. Aside from the occasional brief flicker of life, the overwhelming vibe is of a waste of talent: this is a movie that gathers Fassbender, Isaac, Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult and Rose Byrne, and then gives them almost nothing to do.

7. “X-Men” (2000)
More than any other movie, “X-Men” (perhaps paired with “Blade” two years earlier) is responsible for the current wave of comic book movies. The first blockbuster Marvel movie (taking $150 million in the U.S. alone), it was a reminder that you could take a serious, semi-grounded approach to comic book material a world away from Joel Schumacher’s Batman films, and proved that you didn’t need big A-list stars to mount a major franchise. Its success led to “Spider-Man” two years later, not to mention the entire X-franchise that, now in its seventeenth year, is the longest running in comic-book movie history. It’s also, in retrospect, not a great movie in many respects. Introducing us to the world of mutants mostly through the eyes of Anna Paquin’s teen Rogue, who is befriended by Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), tutored by Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), and targeted by Magneto (Ian McKellen), it has its fair share of poor moments, dubious miscasting, or 90s-throwback design and often feels tentative where it should be confident. But Singer (and the script, credited to David Hayter but with uncredited work by half of Hollywood) does make it stand out among the slightly rubbish action and overblown moments by giving it a real substance, never forgetting the metaphorical power that the characters’ mutant outcast status has. There’s some visually striking moments too (particularly the startling, Auschwitz-set opening), and while not every piece of casting worked out — see Halle Berry, James Marsden — it says something that some of these actors are still reprising their roles, a decade and a half on.

READ MORE: Ranked: All The ‘X-Men’ Movie Mutant Characters From Best To Worst

6. “Valkyrie” (2008)
Neither as good as you might hope or as bad as you feared, “Valkyrie” takes a fascinating story, fills it with great actors, entertains and informs and yet never quite reaches a level above ‘competent.’ Reuniting Singer with his “Usual Suspects” writer Christopher McQuarrie (who co-wrote with Nathan Alexander, and who formed his enduring friendship and creative partnership with star Tom Cruise here), and being the only non-fantasy film that Singer’s made since “Apt Pupil” nearly two decades ago, the film tells the story of Operation Valkyrie, a plot by senior Nazi military types to assassinate Hitler in 1944. Cruise plays Claus Von Stauffenberg, the one-eyed, one-handed Colonel who becomes embroiled in the German Resistance and suggests the plan of using the Reserve Army to help a coup once Hitler and Himmler are dead, and though his casting was controversial in Germany thanks to his Scientology ties, he’s perfectly adequate, though a way off his best work. Indeed, that’s true of about everyone: Singer stuffs the film with great character actors like Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp, Tom Wilkinson, Christian Berkel and Eddie Izzard, but few get much to play other than being stern and conspiratorial. It’s pleasingly adult, but almost a little too much so: there’s a sort of dry, History Channel vibe to proceedings, and you start to long for something that feels like the film’s alive and not just laying out events as they want down. Still, Singer’s handle on tension, arguably his strongest asset and one the superhero movies don’t always let him play with, is perhaps at its best here, with a few breathless suspense sequences that are worth the price of admission.

5. “X-Men: Days Of Future Past” (2014)
After over a decade away, and with the superhero landscape looking very different, Singer returned (after Matthew Vaughn bailed) to the X-franchise he spawned for a movie that Fox hoped would vault the series into the big leagues, rather than the $500 million or so it had been making. Between his return (though with a since-dropped civil lawsuit of sexual assault brewing at the time, Singer was mostly absent from the press tour at the time) and its clever plan of uniting the two eras of X-casts through time travel, the film managed the feat, being both a big grosser and popular with fans, reinvigorating the franchise in a big way. Based on one of the best-loved stories in the comics, the film opens in a dystopian future, as Xavier and his team of new mutants are being exterminated by robotic Sentinels. In a last ditch attempt at survival, Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) sends Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back to the 1970s to prevent the disaffected Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from assassinating scientist Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), an act that brought about this mutant apocalypse. There’s a lot going on here, and not all of it works (Singer’s approach to design has always been an achilles heel, and it’s particularly poor here) but Simon Kinberg’s script juggles its characters and decade-hopping plotting pretty well, while the director keeps the tone pleasingly light most of the time, particularly in the now-famous Quicksilver sequence, a moment that comes close to matching the opening of X2 as the signature X-Men scene. The film’s flawed, but this is easily the second best of the franchise to date, and makes it all the more baffling that “Apocalypse” is such a backwards step.