Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Essential only in the sense that it ends the nine-film story, and it is the weakest of the three by most readings. The verdict above is about position: this is where the saga stops, so leaving it out leaves the trilogy open.

Its central problem is that it is a rebuttal. J. J. Abrams returned after a change of director and made a film that reverses most of the previous one's decisions: Rey's parentage is retconned into significance, Palpatine is restored in an opening crawl with no preparation, and the previous film's refusals are each walked back inside the first act. A trilogy in which the second film argues with the first and the third argues with the second does not accumulate.

The pace is the other complaint. It opens at a sprint and never slows: a sequence of fetch quests for objects that lead to other objects, across four planets in roughly forty minutes, with almost no scene allowed to breathe. The previous films were criticised for slackness; this one leaves no room to care.

There are things in it that land. Adam Driver finishes Kylo Ren's arc properly and the sequence on the Death Star wreckage is well staged. Carrie Fisher had died in 2016 and her remaining role was assembled from unused footage, which the film handles with evident care. It finishes the story. That is about the most that can be said for it.