Gonna go out on a limb here and say Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Yes, I'm a broken record I know. I've been praising this movie since 2017 and it's never stopped blowing my mind (and it still doesn't make sense to me that this is a hot take).
It took what was my favorite movie back then and just expanded on it so much. It's better than the original because it focuses 100% on what made the first movie special: The characters.
We had a deeper look into all of the main characters, got to explore their deeper fears, and how those scars affected their companionship. This is a sequel that understood that the most compelling conflict you can have in a story is the one we each carry within - and ultimately, it's a conflict no one can resolve on their own, but it gets easier to deal with when you're surrounded by people who truly care.
Of course, the movie gets an actual supervillain too, but Ego the character is as much the villain here as actual ego. And by making the villain someone who actually matters to the story of the protagonist, that makes every part of the story compelling - a contrast to the first movie which can really drag whenever the villains are on-screen.
I went into the theater to watch this genuinely stressed about how it'd live up to a film I loved so dearly, and came out of the theater blown away and with a real certainty that this was going to be my favorite trilogy. Because, yeah, after this it was very obvious that James Gunn could do no wrong with these characters.
