Captain America: The Winter Soldier

 A superhero should always battle a foe as powerful as he is. Otherwise, there's no contest. Yet if you look at the history of superhero films, few of them have villains who pop as memorably as their blocky-chested men in capes. There's Heath Ledger's Joker, of course (the leering granddaddy of psychotic bad guys), and also Jack Nicholson's Joker, and Tom Hiddleston's Loki. Beyond that, the landscape is thick with low-camp cartoons such as Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor, boilerplate CGI treachery, or villains who simply didn't cut it. In that light, the creators of Captain America: The Winter ­Soldier have brought off something fresh and bold: They have taken Captain America (Chris Evans), the engagingly square strongman from the flag-waving '40s, and planted him in the black-ops cynicism of the present day, where the ­villain isn't some over-the-top mastermind but, in fact, the very military-industrial complex he's out to defend. He now faces an ominously timely faceless evil.