All the Spider-Man movies, ranked from worst to best

Will Tom Holland’s Spider-Man ever escape the shadow of other superheroes? Even in death, Tony Stark looms large over Far From Home, the second supposed solo vehicle for the Holland version of Spidey. The gadgets, the villain, the dramatic motivations—all labor to position teenage Peter as Iron Man Jr., a creative direction perhaps shaped by the relationship between uneasy corporate collaborators Marvel and Sony. Beneath all that elegiac MCU crossover stuff, though, this is a largely charming example of old-school Spider-Man storytelling, with Parker increasingly struggling to balance the Spider and Man sides of his life on a European study-abroad trip. The romantic-comedy elements with MJ (Zendaya) are touching and funny, and though the big bad here is intrinsically linked to Stark (again!), the ruse he pulls on Parker feels true to the superhero’s crisis of dual identities—his desire to have a real life outside of skyscraper swinging. Also, the reveal of that adversary is truly a hoot, offering an actor once considered for the iconic red suit himself a consolatory spot in the hammy rogues gallery.

Tom Holland’s second turn in the spandex (after his delightful debut in Captain America: Civil War) suffers from the same crossover obligations as the two films that followed. Which is to say, the worst thing about it is that it has to be a Marvel movie. Thankfully, it’s also a rather good Spider-Man movie, one that dispenses (thank Odin!) with another take on the origin story, even as it returns the character to his roots as a high school student still trying to figure out the whole work-life balance thing. Holland is a wonderfully adolescent hero, maybe the first actor who’s made Peter look and behave like an actual kid, immature and confused and vulnerable. And the movie nods to decades of back-issue source material by turning the villain, Michael Keaton’s embittered tech developer The Vulture, into an adult authority figure from his “normal” life. The car ride to the dance, a juicy bit of underplayed menace on Keaton’s part, is among the finest showdowns in the cinematic Spidey canon, despite a total absence of web slinging. With better action and a few less moments designed to situate this in the larger MCU portfolio (seriously, do we really need that many scenes with Happy Hogan?), Homecoming would be an instant classic. As is, it’s still a strong kickoff for this age of Spider spectaculars.

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man plainly hails from a simpler time for superhero blockbusters and a very complicated time for national identity. There are elements that date the movie: the special effects; the endearingly corny post-9/11 appeals to NYC solidarity; Macy Gray. But there’s also something timeless about Raimi’s bright, elastic approximation of an exaggerated comic-book world—a quality that extends from the big colors and slingshot camerawork to the perfect human-cartoon casting of J.K. Simmons as bloviating newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson. The, ahem, sticking point for a lot of diehard Spidey fans remains Tobey Maguire, who plays Peter Parker as less of a classic introverted geek than an alien doing a strange impression of human interaction. Nonetheless, Raimi smartly roots the movie in his awkwardness, getting at some of the essential appeal of the character as a tragically uncool kid; when he becomes Spider-Man—in a series of scenes that give the origin-story boilerplate stuff a real shot in the arm—the wish-fulfillment fantasy of it shines brighter, even as we’re never allowed to forget that it’s the same stammering space cadet under the mask. What really takes Spider-Man over the top is Willem Dafoe’s literally finger-licking turn as the Green Goblin, still one of the most enjoyably outsized renderings of cackling supervillain menace yet put on the big screen.

It’s difficult to imagine that No Way Home will spark the kind of mass joy inspired by the last Spider-Man movie to drop characters from other dimensions into a single bustling New York. Sony’s idiosyncratically animated adventure still feels like something of a minor miracle: a superhero extravaganza that’s both breathlessly referential and steeped in its own emotional reality, thanks to a plot that dual functions as a moving introduction to that other teenage Spider-Man, Miles Morales, and a kaleidoscopic ensemble comedy of geeky comic-book lore. Certainly, we’ve never seen a funnier version of this material on screen, with the famous Lord/Miller school of zinger-heavy cartoon shenanigans deployed to satirize the reigning trends in current superhero cinema, from endlessly rebooted continuities to the bloated casts of extended universes. As with the Holland films, one can’t help but love the main character enough to wonder if he deserved a less crowded showcase. (Which is to say: Here’s hoping we eventually just get a Miles Morales movie, no Spider-Verse required.) But it would be churlish to complain about such a wonderfully creative and affectionate tribute to Spider-Man mythology—especially one whose every computer generated image looks this beautiful.

Being Spider-Man sucks. That’s maybe the essential truth of this decades-old character, an honest kid who knows he’s been handed an incredible gift and that he has to use it for the greater good, no matter the havoc it wreaks on his life. Spider-Man can save the city, but he can’t always save his relationships or his job or his grades. Sam Raimi understands that core tenet of the hero, and he puts it at the very center of his glorious sequel, which soulfully expands on its predecessor in just about every way. The effects and action set-pieces are better. The villain, played by a committed Alfred Molina, is every bit as memorable and entertaining as Dafoe’s Goblin. And Raimi lets even more of his cracked horror-auteur imagination peek through the big-budget framework, most exquisitely in an operating-room sequence that calls back to his Evil Dead roots. Mostly, though, what he does is invest seriously in the fundamental dilemma of the character, with a vital assist from screenwriter Alvin Sargent and the novelist (and comic-book enthusiast) Michael Chabon. The irony is that he emerges with a movie about how hard it is to balance the two sides of Parker’s life that achieves that balance gracefully. It puts Spider-Man 2 at the top of not just this ranking but very possibly a larger one devoted to all movies pulled from the brightly colored panels of a Marvel comic book.