After more than 17 years of releases, ranking all the MCU movies from worst to best gets harder every time Marvel Studios releases a new installment. Getting fans to sign a diplomatically approved ranking would be impossible, so we’ve gone ahead and just cooked our own, risking an online Infinity War that not even the Avengers could stop.

Flame on! Buoyant, bracing and, most shocking of all, brief, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” represents a quantum leap of ship-righting. Everything about this amiable adventure — its space-age idiom,