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100
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The New York Times A.O. Scott
It's been a long time since a commercially oriented film with the scale of "King" ended with such an enduring and heartbreaking coda.
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100
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Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
As completely real on the psychological level as its up-to-the-moment visual effects have on the physical.
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100
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Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
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.
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100
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USA Today Claudia Puig
As good as each individual movie is, the third film vaults the work into the stratosphere of classic movies. Key characters are enhanced, new civilizations visited and battles fought more intensely, while feelings and motivations are plumbed more deeply and movingly.
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100
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Washington Post Desson Thomson
This movie is not only a thrilling experience, it closes the book on a truly satisfying trilogy.
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100
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Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
The invisible wizard Peter Jackson makes use of every scene to show us the meaning of magnificence. Never has a filmmaker aimed higher, or achieved more.
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90
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Washington Post Stephen Hunter
Then, finally, there are the endings, all six of them...For us outsiders, it seems like too much of a good thing...But all those are minor rants: The big fact is that The Return of the King puts you there at Waterloo, or Thermopylae or the Bulge, any desperate place where men ran low on blood and iron and ammo, but not on courage.
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88
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Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
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.
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88
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Rolling Stone Peter Travers
This is a film in which ideas resonate as well as action. Gandalf's words to Pippin about death have a muscular poetry.
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75
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San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Though an estimable success overall, The Return of the King has several scenes too many and too great a concentration on battles.
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