Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Skippable on a first watch and much better on a second, once you already like the character enough to follow him somewhere unpleasant. Nothing in Last Crusade or anything after requires it.

It is the strangest major studio sequel of its decade. A prequel nobody asked for, set a year earlier, with no returning characters except Indy, and a tone that goes from a Busby Berkeley musical number in a Shanghai nightclub to child slavery and a man having his heart removed while conscious. It was violent enough that Spielberg and Lucas took the complaints to the ratings board, and PG-13 was created in its wake alongside Gremlins.

The thing a recommendation has to say out loud is the depiction of India, which is bad. The banquet sequence invents revolting food to disgust a Western audience, the villagers are helpless and the cult is a lurid distortion of a real religion. Production was refused permission to film in India and the finished film was banned there for a period. None of that is a matter of changing taste; it was criticised at the time, and it is the main reason the film sits where it does on this list.

Against that: it is the most visually inventive of the three, the mine cart chase and the rope bridge are superb, and Spielberg's direction is at its most unleashed. Willie Scott is a regression from Marion in every respect and Short Round is the best thing in it. Watch it third, or fourth, and not first.