Metacritic reviews

What a movie! This is how the medium seduced us originally.

One of the wonders of the holiday season.

Here is the jaw-dropping, eye-popping, heart-stopping movie epic we've been waiting for all year.

A surprisingly tender, even heartbreaking, film. Like the original, it's a tragic tale of beauty and the beast.

The gorilla is great, the girl terrific, sets are out of this world, creatures icky as hell, and the director clearly does not believe in the word "enough."

Almost too much of a good thing, Peter Jackson's remake of the film that made him want to make movies is a super-sized version of a yarn that was big to begin with, a stupendous adventure that maximizes, and sometimes oversells, its dazzling wares.

King Kong is an homage not just to the original but to the history of movies themselves.

I say this as someone for whom the very idea of a Kong remake is sacrilege, Jackson's straitened conception yields up a pretty damn good popcorn movie.

This Kong is high-powered entertainment, but Jackson pushes too hard and loses momentum over the more than three hours of the movie. The story was always a goofy fable--that was its charm--and a well-told fable knows when to stop.

Our response to the ape's doom, once touched by authentic tragedy, is now marked by relief that this wretchedly excessive movie is finally over.