The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Skippable, and the best of the three Hobbit films by a clear margin. If you are going to watch only one of them, watch this, and accept that it ends in the middle of a sentence.

Smaug is the reason. He is the best digital creature in any of the six films, enormous and unhurried and genuinely enjoying himself, and the long conversation between a dragon and a burglar in a hall full of gold is the only stretch of this trilogy that matches the register of the book. Benedict Cumberbatch performed the movement as well as the voice and the animation carries it.

The barrel escape is the other high point, a comic action sequence with a clear joke running through it, and the film generally moves. Mirkwood and the spiders are properly unpleasant. Laketown, where the film has to invent a political subplot to fill time, is where the three-film decision is most visible.

Tauriel, invented for the films because the book has no women in it at all, is the most argued-about addition in the series. The character is fine and the romance written around her is not, and the Extended Edition's extra twenty-five minutes make the Laketown material worse rather than better. Watch the theatrical cut here.