O Senhor dos Anéis: O Regresso do Rei

Pops your eyes, excites your senses and brings you in as close as a whisper for scenes of startling emotion.

Not only has Jackson boldly and faithfully brought J.R.R. Tolkien's world to life, he's created the most epic and sweeping fantasy adventure of all time.

Imbues its central conflicts with mythic timelessness.

As the capstone to one of the single greatest achievements of modern motion-picture history, The Return of the King is generally peerless.

Jackson's Hole

And if, ultimately, The Return of the King isn't quite the thrilling conclusion we were all quite hoping for, it is still very much a rousingly successful end to what may be the most accomplished and satisfying movie trilogy of all time.

With The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Peter Jackson delivers a decent ending to his fantasy trilogy -- actually, about 12 endings.

The Return Of The King ultimately proves up to the series' increasingly difficult task: making movies that echo legends, making legends that reflect life, and reconciling it all with the fact that both legends and lives all eventually meet their ends.

Yes, the running time is long, and yes, those many endings in a slow, dreamy coda left me feeling spent -- better spent than I can ever remember.

An insurmountable amount of extras comes second only to New Line Home Video's stunning visual and audio transfer of Peter Jackson's exhilarating and exhausting epic.

Standing out amid an excellent cast is Elijah Wood, stymied by tweeness in the earlier films but here convincingly developing the character of Frodo as the embodiment of valor and self-sacrifice.

As I watched this film, an eager victim of its boundless will to astound, I found my loyal memories of the book beginning to fade.

The film event of the millennium.

I went along with the first and admired the second, but it wasn't until the third that I was swept away by the magnitude of Jackson's vision.

It reminds you of the power of film like no other movie in memory.

The thrilling conclusion to what has become the film event of our time -- the definitive screen fantasy -- features more spellbinding moments, bigger battles, more emotion and more poetry than the terrific first two films in the trilogy.

Return of the King is such a crowning achievement, such a visionary use of all the tools of special effects, such a pure spectacle, that it can be enjoyed even by those who have not seen the first two films.

Confirms Jackson's reputation as a kinetic director who has made author J.R.R. Tolkien's work his own -- not as plagiarist but as a visionary.

The final chapter completes The Lord of the Rings series in thrilling style -- and restores faith in the idea that popular entertainment can soar to majestic heights.

This is the best of the three Rings movies -- more than that, it makes the others look even better.