Return of the Jedi

Essential, and the one with the clearest division between its two halves. The throne room is the best material in the trilogy. The forest moon is where the franchise's commercial instincts become visible for the first time.

Take the good half first. The last forty minutes are three things happening at once, and the one that matters is a young man being told, correctly, that he is angry, and choosing to put down a weapon and lose rather than win by becoming what he is fighting. The Emperor's plan is not to defeat Luke, it is to make him succeed, and the film's resolution is a refusal. That is an unusual climax for a space adventure and it is staged almost entirely in close-up.

The Jabba's palace opening is also better than it is usually credited for: twenty-five minutes of puppetry, a plan nobody explains, and a Luke who now arrives already dangerous. The Ewoks are the complaint, and the honest version of it is not that they are cute but that the film resolves a galactic war with them, which makes the Empire look careless.

On versions: the Special Edition replaces the end celebration music and inserts shots of other worlds, and the 2004 release replaced Sebastian Shaw's face at the very end with Hayden Christensen, which retroactively ties the ending to a trilogy made twenty years later. Opinions on that run hot. The original is, again, not available in high definition.