5. The Dollars Trilogy
A slight departure from the usual rules of the trilogy here, since Sergio Leone never explicitly envisioned The Dollars Trilogy as a unified whole, despite the fact that Clint Eastwood played the leads in all three, and basically played the same character, right down to the same mannerisms and outfit. But general wisdom suggests that The Dollars Trilogy demands to be watched as a trilogy, and because their legacy tends to be considered in terms of the series as a whole, they genuinely do belong together. As a whole, the trilogy invented the Spaghetti Western genre, and brought Clint Eastwood to the height of his fame, as well as giving us Ennio Morricone's superlative scores, which have themselves gone on to inform vast libraries of subsequent releases, both in cinema and mainstream music. To make such a cool triptych of movies in a genre so widely lambasted for its occasional empty bravado, which ultimately spelled the end of the Western entirely, when more cynical views of violence became the norm, is an astonishing achievement. Even when the Western died - before the modern revival - the Dollars trilogy transcended all criticism, and they are rightly considered a triumph of film-making, even more than a simple triumph of genre film-making.
The Uncharacteristic Low Point? The middle, For A Few Dollars More sags ever so slightly, thanks to a less tight grip on plot, but when you consider the highs of that movie, the concerns evaporate quickly.