The Best Movie Trilogies of All Time

Satyajit Ray pawned his life insurance and his wife's jewellery to finish Pather Panchali, and the West Bengal government filed its rescue loan under road improvement because of the title. Cannes gave the film Best Human Document in 1956. Everything the trilogy does afterwards — Aparajito in 1956, Apur Sansar in 1959 — grows out of two children running through the kaash field to watch a train go past.

Golden Lion at Venice in 1993 was shared between Blue and Altman's Short Cuts, and Kieślowski had the other two out the following year — White and Red both carry 1994. Ranking this above Middle-earth is the provocation: three films that repeat no plot, only a colour and a moral question, with Red reaching back to close all three. Watch the sugar cube held against the rim of a coffee cup until it soaks through.

Eleven Academy Awards went to The Return of the King in 2004, every category it was nominated in, and no film has swept harder. Jackson put out one instalment a year — 2001, 2002, 2003 — and the middle one is the one people underrate. Boromir's death at Amon Hen breaks the fellowship apart at the end of the first film, and the six hours and twenty minutes of theatrical running time that follow are spent earning it.

Nobody had won Best Picture with a sequel before Part II took it at the 1975 ceremony, and no trilogy anywhere has higher first two rungs. Part III arrived sixteen years after the second, in 1990, and it is the reason this sits at four instead of one. Michael in the Bronx restaurant, fetching the gun taped behind the cistern, is where the arc actually turns.

George Lucas directed only the first one. Irvin Kershner took The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and Richard Marquand Return of the Jedi in 1983 — handing the middle film to somebody else is the best decision this franchise ever made. Six numbered films sit either side: the prequels precede it, and the sequel trilogy reopens the 1983 ending rather than carrying on from it. Trench run at the close of the 1977 film still cuts faster than anything since.

Kurosawa wrote to Leone that the picture was very fine and also that it was his. Toho sued over Yojimbo, the case settled out of court, and Kurosawa took fifteen percent of the revenue — more money than Yojimbo itself earned him. Nobody planned these as a set, and the bulletproof breastplate under Eastwood's poncho is a one-off in the 1964 finale; what the 1965 and 1966 films enlarge is the persona, not the gag.

Nolan wanted forty minutes of the middle film on IMAX cameras and the finished cut carries about twenty-eight, starting with the bank-heist prologue, which is why 2008 looks like a different picture from 2005 and means to. Three films, one thesis: a city gets a symbol, the symbol gets abused, the symbol gets handed on in 2012. Ra's al Ghul on the runaway monorail ends the first film with Gotham's own infrastructure as the weapon.

Nine years separate each film from the last — 1995, 2004, 2013 — and Hawke and Delpy share the screenplay credit with Linklater from the second one on, which earned all three of them an Oscar nomination in 2005. Two people talking in a Vienna listening booth, avoiding each other's eyes inside a mirrored glass box, is the whole method in ninety seconds.

Park Chan-wook made these across four years — 2002, 2003, 2005 — and Oldboy took the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004 from a jury Quentin Tarantino was chairing. Ryu is deaf, and the film puts him at the riverbank with his back turned, scattering his sister's ashes, while the sound design lets you hear everything he cannot. Cruellest minute in any trilogy.

Eric Stoltz played Marty McFly for about five weeks before Zemeckis fired him on 10 January 1985 and reshot the lot with Michael J. Fox. Look at what survived that: a trilogy that plants the clock tower in its opening minutes and then spends two sequels, 1989 and 1990, paying off things nobody would have bothered setting up. Lightning strike on the courthouse ledge is still perfect.

Edgar Wright invented this grouping as a joke in a Hot Fuzz interview, comparing his ice-cream cameos to Kieślowski, then went and made it true: strawberry for the zombie film in 2004, blue for the cop film in 2007, mint for the alien film in 2013. Watch the two identical walks to the corner shop, one before the outbreak and one after, and count what he fails to notice.

Rupert Wyatt directed the 2011 film and Matt Reeves the other two, in 2014 and 2017, and Caesar's story finishes at the end of War — which is why a 2024 fourth film set three hundred years after his death does not break the set. Andy Serkis in the cage, forcing out one word at his handler, is the moment the series stops being a remake.