I should have waited to post my super hero movie list. I took my son to see Man of Steel yesterday. It is the new Superman reboot from Zack Snyder, and it is one of the best of the bunch. It makes the 2006 Superman Returns even more irrelevant than it already is.

There is plenty of capes and x-ray vision and Lois Lane in this new telling, but this is a human movie, about fathers and sons and mothers and teenagers and everyday heroes. It is in quiet moments when the power of this film are manifest, moments when a mother weeps for the child she will never see again but willingly surrenders or when she fears her son will be out of her reach if everyone knows what he can do or when fathers protect their sons with the shield of their own lives. And even in the cringing, 9/11 collapsing skyscrapers of the movie’s final battle scenes there are little human moments that save the ending from being swamped in CGI, scenes of cops shepherding people to safety as the city falls down on them or a hand to hold when fear has gripped the heart.

But I wax poetic, to my shame. It is only a movie about someone who does not exist. Perhaps, though, we would all be better off if a bit of the Man of Steel stayed here with us.

Ever since we turned the calendar to the twenty-first century, Hollywood has turned it’s gaze upon heroes. Not soldiers or fire fighters or that guy who dives into a frozen river to save someone from a sinking car, but SUPER heroes. There have been more movies about comic book super heroes since 2000 than in all the prior years of cinema’s history. We’ve had super hero series, like Batman and Spider Man and Iron Man (man, that’s a lot of man’s). We’ve had movies about what it means to be a super hero, like Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan’s last decent movie, and Kick-Ass and Hancock. Some have worked (Christopher Nolan’s Batman series) and some haven’t (like anything associated with the name Spider Man).

But whether it works or not, I’m good with all this super heroing. Maybe it’s just me, but I like it when the bad guys aren’t really the good guys or when all we find out about the good guys is how bad they really are. Just give me the red blooded American, John Wayne swagger, hero treatment. And that’s what this current crop of super hero movies is, for the most part. Even Hollywood has generally left it’s political and social commentary on the cutting room floor and given us films about super heroes and not social justice.

These are my ten favorites, but there are so many I’m sure some of your favorites didn’t make my cut. Or maybe I just didn’t pick the film from the series you would choose. Let me know what I was crazy to leave off the list.