This might come across as a contrarian hot take, but it seems obvious to me that the best film in the Star Wars series is, in fact, Star Wars.
Why Star Wars should have stopped at one film This article was originally published in May 2020. “It is because of the emotions stirred in Empire,” wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times when the film was re-released in 1997, “that the entire series takes on a mythic quality that resonates back to the first and ahead to the third. Directed by Irvin Kershner, it’s the Star Wars episode with the highest score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes (94%) and from viewers on Imdb (8.7), and the one that is said to elevate the saga as a whole. It’s 40 years this month since The Empire Strikes Back was released, and for most of that time the second film in the Star Wars series has been enshrined as the best: the darkest, the most complex, the most mature.
