300 is a bruising, battering, visually resplendent caterwaul of an action-adventure, and I imagine the fighting men and women it celebrates probably wouldn’t have had their story told any other way.

Few films are either as magical or as enchanting as Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. At the same time, few fairy tales are as perverse, terrifying or as deeply disturbing.

Ultimately, if The Return of the King isn’t quite the thrilling conclusion we were all hoping for, it is still very much a rousingly successful culmination to what may be the most satisfying cinematic trilogy of all time.

Despite a winning moment here and a wonderful one there, The Haunted Mansion has more in common with The Country Bears than it does Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and that’s too bad.

Whoa.

This gigantic undertaking is never anything less than stunning for practically every second of its almost three-hour running time, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers surpassing the considerably large expectations of an over-eager audience at nearly every opportunity.