Reviewed By: Paul Mount

Starring: Sir Ian McKellan, Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Viggo Mortensen, Andy Serkis, Orlando Bloom, John Rhys-Davies,

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I could probably leave it there really. You’re going to see THE RETURN OF THE KING whatever the reviews say - and they’ve all been quite positive on the whole (this is irony, by the way) - so you don’t need any endorsement from me to encourage you to part with your coinage of the realm over the Christmas period and beyond. But make no mistake, THE RETURN OF THE KING is a masterpiece, modern cinema’s finest hour, a blast from start to finish. I liked it.

But I’ll admit I was worried. I felt like a freak because (whisper it) I never really took to THE TWO TOWERS; the theatrical version was just too bitty, too disjointed. I had problems with the film’s tone and I couldn’t take the talking trees seriously. Peter Jackson’s Tolkein saga looked in danger of crumbling into fa