Top Ten: film trilogies from Toy Story to L'avventura

1. Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3
2. The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Godfather Part III
3. Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi
4. Three Colors: Blue, Three Colors: White, Three Colors: Red
5. Back to the Future, Back to the Future II, Back to the Future III
6. L’Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse
7. The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, The Return of the King
8. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, For a Few Dollars More, A Fistful of Dollars
9. The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum
10. The Naked Gun, The Naked Gun 2 1/2, The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult

Points for: tracking the passage of time; thematic unity; character development; consistency of filmmaking; 'closure'. Obviously, I'd have like to have included the first three Alien films and Indiana Jones movies — they would have slottted in somewhere after Antonioni, but before Bourne, the Alien films just ahead of the Indys— but sensed a whole world of trouble if I made exceptions for just those films. A pox on Crystal Skull and Jean-Pierre Jeunet! The Godfather gets second place because 3 was the weak link, Star Wars third because of Jedi. Back to the Future over Lord of the rings because as time goes on, the LORD films blur into a grey mass of heaving Orc pectorals (same with Bourne and blurry European capitals). Toy Story 3 gets top spot because it is the only trilogy that got better as it went along, with 2 better than 1, and 3 topping 2 — an unparrallelled upward trajectory.