The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Critic Reviews

Yet what I felt when the lights came up at the end of this visionary, titanic, relentless experience was something different: a strange relief that it was, at last, over.Read the full review

There is little enough psychological depth anywhere in the films, actually, and they exist mostly as surface, gesture, archetype and spectacle. They do that magnificently well, but one feels at the end that nothing actual and human has been at stake.Read the full review

The conclusion of Peter Jackson's masterwork is passionate and literate, detailed and expansive, and it's conceived with a risk-taking flair for old-fashioned movie magic at its most precious.Read the full review

As completely real on the psychological level as its up-to-the-moment visual effects have on the physical.Read the full review

Labeling this as a "movie" is almost an injustice. This is an experience of epic scope and grandeur, amazing emotional power, and relentless momentum.Read the full review

This is a film in which ideas resonate as well as action. Gandalf’s words to Pippin about death have a muscular poetry.Read the full review

Though an estimable success overall, The Return of the King has several scenes too many and too great a concentration on battles.Read the full review

It might be the cinema's most astonishing holy war film. The Lord of the Rings took seven years and an army of gifted artists to execute, and the striving of its makers is in every splendid frame. It's more than a movie--it's a gift.Read the full review

An epic success and a history-making production that finishes with a masterfully entertaining final installment.Read the full review