King Kong: Critic Reviews

The movie seals Jackson's reputation: He's the most gifted big-picture artist working today, a master of epics from a human-eye view who excels at employing 21st-century technological wizardry to suit the needs of ageless, personal storytelling.

Peter Jackson's remake is as much a tribute to the old, seat-of-the-pants spirit of early motion pictures as it is an exercise in technological bravura.

Jackson is a visionary filmmaker who is not only a technical wizard but also a master storyteller.

One hundred eighty-seven minutes of mesmerization, astonishment, thrills, chills, spills, kills and ills, Peter Jackson's big monkey picture show is certainly the best popular entertainment of the year.

You've seen it all before but most assuredly never like this.

Given the excessive length and bombastic F/X, there's too much action and precious little poetry.

The $200 million-plus spectacle is funny when it wants to be, exhilarating when it needs to be and a sentimental triumph at the end.

Peter Jackson's King Kong is the most thrilling, soulful monster picture ever made. At last, it can be said without irony -- I laughed, I cried.

Too big for its own good, too pure of heart to diminish, brawling, magnificent, heroic and flawed: That's King Kong, and that's King Kong.

King Kong rules, and the big ape's reign is almost problem-free.

This Kong is high-powered entertainment, but Jackson pushes too hard and loses momentum over the more than three hours of the movie.

This is one of the year's best films.

Jackson is filmmaker and entertainer enough to use all the technology at his disposal without losing sight of the sublimely improbable story of beast and beauty, and the exquisitely realized islands they call home.

Although King Kong is spectacular, its power doesn't reside in its glittering vision of 1933 Manhattan, Jackson's virtuoso flourishes or his computer-generated effects. It's so much simpler: When the gorilla touches the girl, he touches our hearts.

Serkis' contribution truly is something we've never seen, an entirely new category of computer-enhanced acting. With not a word of dialogue, he brings to life a close cousin to man with whom we can empathize, yet is never too human-like.

Monstrous. Monumental. Magnificent. Use any term you want, there's no denying the power, genius and spectacle of King Kong, which is certainly the biggest movie of the year and possibly the biggest movie ever made.

At three hours, Jackson's Kong is too bloated and digressive to match the pure adrenaline of the first film, perhaps the finest B-movie ever made.

Silly, pointless and obscenely overproduced.

What's up on screen is rarely short of staggering.

Most great movies are lucky to have a handful of moments to remember; King Kong has at least two dozen.

It starts too slowly and suffers from weak dialogue and less-than-epic acting. But as popcorn movies go, this is the year's popcorniest.

Jackson took a huge risk with King Kong. But the movie that no film lover wanted him to make is sure to become the blockbuster that everyone is going to want to see, and with good reason.

There are some dazzling moments and remarkably clunky ones, a stitched together mixture of old and new, a genre tour that jumps in tone from jaunty comedy to sci-fi horror to laboured social commentary.

Good things do come in big packages. The trick for any filmmaker is to find the small movie within the big one, which is exactly what Peter Jackson does in King Kong.