Though I haven't seen the original 1933 King Kong since I was a kid – and even so, I'm not sure if I sat through the whole thing – after watching Peter Jackson's epic 2005 remake, I gained a belated respect for the boldness of Ernest B. Schoedsack's and Merian C. Cooper's vision: at a time when the "talkies" were… read more!

I don't know what to say about this film other than it is, as expected, perfectly made. But I will fill a little column space with biographical trivia: When I was a kid, I saw Ralph Bakshi's animated Lord of the Rings several times. It was a feature film that only covered the first book and a half of the… read more!

The celebrated adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy ends here, with a movie bigger, bloodier, longer, and, yes, better than its fine predecessors. Peter Jackson and company pull out all the stops, with huge battle sequences, intense emotional drama, and new depths of evil and madness. The computer-animated Gollum assumes his rightful place as one of cinema's great villains, and the… read more!

I won't fill this review with autobiographical notes as I did in my review of Fellowship of the Ring. But I will reiterate that it's nearly pointless to review this film. If you liked Fellowship, you will surely see The Two Towers. If you didn't, you won't. Because although I enjoyed The Two Towers a bit more than its predecessor,… read more!

Jackson's long-awaited adaptation of Alice Sebold's runaway 2002 bestseller, about a murdered teenager who looks down on the people she left behind (including her killer) from her own private heaven, was perhaps a doomed venture from the start. Although Sebold optioned the film rights to her novel back in 2000, before she was even finished writing, the story, ironically, lacks… read more!

In 2014, Peter Jackson was recruited by the UK's Imperial War Museums and the BBC to make a documentary commemorating the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, the end of World War I. Apparently, all he was given was hundreds of hours of vintage footage shot between 1914 and 1918, and no particular agenda beyond that. Finally using his craze for… read more!