RoTS still has a lot of clunk dialogue and terrible acting ... case in point it's the only Star Wars movie that somehow manages to embarass Darth Vader. 

The whole Anakin Skywalker "turn to the Dark Side" is pretty fucking stupid and weak dramatically too because it's hillariously rushed (largely because Lucas so poorly wrote the previous two films):

Anakin's "Bad Day"

8 AM - Good Guy

11 AM - Good Guy

2:30 PM - Good Guy, feeling good after lunch

4:30 PM - Uh oh, Palpatinez teh Sith Lord!

6:30 PM - AW FUCK IT! GUESS IMMA GONNA HAVE TO KILL A BUNCH OF KIDS NOW 

lol, c'mon Lucas. 

Jedi is underrated in many ways IMO, the Emperor/Vader/Luke scenes are better than anything else in the Star Wars saga and yes that includes even the best scenes from Empire. 

"Sister ... so you have a twin sister ..." is the most delciously evil line in all the Star Wars movies, you can almost see Vader smile underneath his mask and the Emperor is such a wonderful, unnerving embodiment of the Dark Side. Think about what they did in ROTJ for a second ... they create a character who instantly has street cred as someone waaaaay more evil than even Darth Vader. None of the new Star Wars movies (not even TFA or Rogue One) can come close to claiming anything like that. 

I've watched all the movies this year and I've actually came to the conclusion that TFA is the worst movie out of the bunch. It was a shock to me, since I genuinely enjoyed it in the cinema, much more than the new Trilogy by Lucas back in the day, but oh well. The Phantom Menace is the second worst out of the mainline movies, but Liam Neeson and Darth Maul alone are worth more than the whole TFA, which rips off too much off of A New Hope, while giving a constant and unnecessary aura of rush, not explaining what the heck is actually going on in the galaxy and why I should care about what's going on (planets got lown up... so what?) and throws a bucketload of annoying acting on top of it. John Boyega is officially more annoying than Jar Jar Binks! I hate his character, hate the way he plays him, he ruins the whole movie for me (I really don't like dubbing, but I actually found he's less annoying when dubbed in Polish. He was still terrible, but this goes to show just how terrible Boyega is - the less of him, the better). Poe Damron isn't far behind Finn either. Can't stand such cut-out plastic characters. Christensen deserves an Oscar for his Anakin next to these guys.

My list goes like this:

1 - Empire Strikes Back
2 - A New Hope
3 - Return of the Jedi
4 - Revenge of the Sith
5 - Attack of the Clones
6 - The Phantom Menace
7 - The Force Awakens

Rogue One is duking it out with The Force Awakens, I've only seen it once so it's too early for me to place it, plus it's only a spin-off.

All in all I think it's sad that the new movies aren't made by Lucas. I hate the cringeworthy "funny" moments he put into the new trilogy, but overall these are really solid movies and have that magic touch to them. Something the new movies sorely lack.

PS. Han shot first.

I'll be unorthodox with my list:

1. Rogue One
2. Revenge of the Sith
3. The Empire Strikes Back
4. Return of the Jedi
5. The Force Awakens
6. The Phantom Menace
7. A New Hope
8. Attack of the Clones

I have always enjoyed Star Wars ever since I first saw the original trilogy on video more than 25 years ago! Here's what stands out about Rogue One to me in my admittedly unorthodox opinion though:

If 2015's The Force Awakens could be described as new in peripheral ways (such as its diverse cast of characters, for example) but familiar at its core (a core storyline that's very similar to that of A New Hope), Rogue One is the other way around: familiar in peripheral ways, but new at its core. It's the backstory of how the Rebels acquired the Death Star's schematics back in the original 1977 Star Wars movie, these days known as Episode IV: A New Hope. It features a strong aesthetic similarity to that film due to the painstaking faithfulness of the production design style to that of A New Hope and contains numerous references to that movie and other Star Wars installments, many of which only the most hardcore fans of the franchise will get.

In the fundamental respects though, Rogue One takes a very different course than the franchise has up to now. You get that sense immediately when there is no text crawl following "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...", but instead the movie immediately leaps into a backdrop presentation. There are also no Jedis in this film and Darth Vader is the only character with a lightsaber. This is instead a movie -- the only Star Wars movie -- that's truly about the, if you will, real people involved in the conflict between the Empire and the Rebellion. Thus does it feel less like just a particularly well-made superhero movie (like most Star Wars films do) and more like a (mostly) serious war story that is essentially about conveying the sacrifices that go on behind the scenes of the conflict of superheroes and supervillains (the Jedis and Siths) in the series' main storyline. Serious as in we hear the bones of soldiers crunching while children look on and cry. This harsh presentation of war gives some much-needed added weight to the rest of the Star Wars movies. All of these films have the word "wars" in their title, but this is only one that feels like it is taking such a serious subject seriously. Not that there isn't welcome comedy relief from time to time, but the general thrust of the film is serious. The action isn't terribly cartoony in general and isn't meant to feel empowering. Indeed, even the comedy could be described as grim in nature.

There's also more moral complexity to this movie than in traditional Star Wars films. One of the most common criticisms of the Star Wars series is that its moral dichotomy generally features very limited nuance. Among the top reasons why this and Revenge of the Sith are my favorite Star Wars movies is because they revolve to a very substantial degree around exploring that nuance rather than more or less boiling down to simple tales of heroism. When you observe some of the tactics that the Rebels employ and the character arcs of, for example, Bodhi Rook on the one hand and Saw Gerrera on the other. I found that to be a welcome change too. This is still very sci-fi, but it bears a bit more resemblance to life.

Perhaps most importantly though, this movie has a message that couldn't be more timely. It's not just one of resistance against a tyrannical empire (like in so many other Star Wars movies), but of a resistance in which race is implied to be a big factor. Unlike in other Star Wars films, the composition of the Rebels here is overwhelming people of color and led by a woman while the Empire, the film's creator has explained, "is a white supremacist organization" that is not diverse at all. You can't help but think that, in casting white men as villains and diverse characters as Rebels, the film was making a political point, albeit subtly. The Empire's successor organization in The Force Awakens, known as the First Order, was more diverse. I like that the Empire is not diverse in this movie. Having things this way conveys a more specific politics than the franchise usually does. It doesn't just make its villains emblems of authoritarianism and entitlement in the abstract like other Star Wars movies, but rather dares to get more specific, by implication, about the KIND of tyranny that the Empire represents: specifically fascism. With the revival of specifically right wing brands of authoritarian politics in the real world (not least of which in my own country) in recent years, Rogue One feels more directly relevant to the current times to me rather than like another "universal" movie that's for everyone who believes in concepts like freedom and compassion in the abstract. (It's no coincidence that supporters of Donald Trump organized two separate boycotts of this film.)

Critics complain that Rogue One lacks an adequately humanist feel and point to The Force Awakens as more exemplary. *rolls eyes* Well that is an excellent concentration of the problem with humanism's individualist logic right there! The Force Awakens is a superhero movie that has very little to do with real life. This is a movie about a real(ish) revolutionary struggle against fascism and that is what is needed more than anything else in the world right now in the opinion of this contributor. Superhero movies are elitist pictures about special individuals saving the helpless masses. This is a movie that depicts revolution, successful or not to whatever degree, as a mass act and war as genuinely consequential. Which shall we embrace in this time: the individualism of the superhero genre that makes us feel better for a moment in time or the collectivism of revolutionary politics that can actually lead to real-world change?

Grats....you rated them exactly as rottentomatoes does....what a fresh take you have there

Huh? This is my own list and these are my own thoughts. I took an opportunity to share them with the community to start a conversation. I didn't lift my list from some other site.

Please share your own list and explains how it differs from mine. I would welcome that. But this kind of sarcastic, dismissive comment contributes nothing to the conversation.

In how I enjoyed them:
1. Rogue One
2. A New Hope
3. Return of the Jedi
4. Force Awakens
5. Revenge of the Sith
6. Phantom Menace
7. Empire Strikes Back
8. Attack of the Clones

Above I said I liked Return of the Jedi more, but I was focusing too much on the final confrontation, when the reality is I enjoyed the Luke Skywalker story overall a lot more in A New Hope. While I realize a lot of people like Empire Strikes Back, I didn't find it very interesting, it was slow paced and nothing much happened compared to the other movies. Plus there were a lot of silly things like attacking an ice planet with giant oversized walkers, what? Yoda was pretty inconsequential in the film, as were those bounty hunters. The whole movie seemed like a big pitch to sell merchandise. The only movie I found less interesting was Attack of the Clones.

What the prequels have going for them is the much more effective looking lightsaber battles. In the old movie, aside from Luke's flips in Return of the Jedi, there's nothing spectacular about the dueling. They look like they trained a few months in a University sparring class, and completely lack anything that looks like they're using a super human skill like the force. That was one of the downsides to having primitive special effects. So early lightsaber fights look silly by today's standards. On the downside, the prequels also made the lightsaber fights look a bit too cartoony.

Rogue One to me is the best of the films. It's gritty, the battles are more spectacular, the physics seem a lot more realistic; and it is at least significantly better than Phantom Menace and Force Awakens on a rewatch, as it is not bogged down with all sorts of expository scenes and coincidental encounters. It was a really well crafted film, and it had a lot of actual tension and drama; almost completely lacking in all of the other Star Wars films, except for like 5-10 minutes of Revenge of the Sith, and a bit of Force Awakens.

Yeah, the love for Sith has always confused me. Not because it's a terrible movie -- it's poor to fair in my mind -- but because it's not all that different from the first two prequels. The writing is still clumsy, the acting wooden, the direction lazy, the cinematography uninspired, the characters unapproachable. The pacing is better and the action more exciting, but I don't believe that makes up for all its moviemaking sins.

And you nailed the part about Anakin's turn. This is probably the most pivotal moment in the series and yet it falls flat. We never see that good-friend family man seduced by power. We see a fearful, angry young man throw his life away over a vaguely defined myth about immortality. It was unconvincing, it was rushed, and because we as an audience don't particularly care for Anakin, it was dramatically inert.

I really appreciate your analysis of the symbolism of Rogue One. I haven't read anything like that before. Very cool :)

I do think you're giving the movie a little too much credit, though. Yes, the movie introduces some moral gray zones but it never really unpacks them. The ethical problems of rebellion aren't really teased out. Neither are the relationships between characters. Jyn's connection with her estranged father fizzles out. Her complicated partnership with Saw is even less developed. I think that's the overarching theme of Rogue One: underdevelopment. Sub-plots are introduced and dismissed with expediency. There are too many characters with too few understandable or interesting character traits. 

Some will call Rogue One a "war movie," as if that excuses its lack of good storytelling and sympathetic characters. It doesn't. I'd be fine with a Saving Private Ryan-esque war drama set against the Star Wars universe, but it would need to feature characters I cared about and a focused, entertaining narrative with set-ups and pay-offs. 

Acting in all Star Wars movies besides ESB and RotJ is bad. The story in SW besides ANH and ESB is all recycled. People try to pin these movies, especially the old ones as the pennical of acting when they are as bad as the prequels. The dialogue, and acting, in ANH is on par with the mediocrity of AotC and PM. Only saving grace is its the only self contained Star Wars. And then you have TFA, which while the acting is miles above ANH, is... ANH. 

 Of course, if we're going purely on opinion, RotJ is my fave SW. But I recognize its faults enough to not put it above RotS, which is a better movie. 

1. The Empire Strikes Back
2. Revenge of the Sith
3. Return of the Jedi
6. Force Awakens
7. The Phantom Menace
8. Attack of the Clones