Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
A passably satisfying ending to a franchise that has always seemed a little like a bonus DVD.

Name : Mary Ann Gwinn / Alias : Seattle Times
The best of the three "Hobbit" movies, moving from an enjoyable action/battle movie with fantastic visuals into the realm of authentic tragedy.

Name : Drew Hunt / Alias : Chicago Reader
Mindless CGI spectacle overpowers every aspect of Peter Jackson's concluding Tolkien adaptation; like the other installments of this lumbering trilogy, it's more tech-demo than movie.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
[Freeman] could have made a great Bilbo. Instead he's the one thing that has made this trilogy bearable.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
"The 144-minute running time showcases Jackson's worst tendencies: eons-long battle scenes, sloppy and abrupt resolutions, portentous romances, off-rhythm comic timing, and, newly in this case, patience-testing fan service."

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
More battles, more creatures, more not-quite-comical asides, more stern speechifying and more gob-smackingly elaborate action set pieces.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
The magic, fleeting to start with, is mostly gone.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Jackson has marched the modern fantasy-action epic into a thundering blind alley; the movie exhausts your senses without ever engaging your imagination.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
By the second hour of The Battle of the Five Armies, the visual approach becomes a paradox: monotonously dynamic epic storytelling.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Third time's a charm for the mammoth screen version of Tolkien's little persons' odyssey.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Whose story is this? There's an old saying that history is written by the winners. The screenplay for "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies" must have been written by elves.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The final installment of the Hobbit trilogy is the best, featuring more spectacular action scenes as well as the series' most emotionally resonant moments.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
The pleasure is intense, and mixed with awe. There is majesty here, and not just because we're in the presence of magnificently regal madness.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
It's adequately visionary, it's routinely spectacular, it breathes fire and yet somehow feels room-temperature.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Talk about beating a dead orc. In dutifully completing his prequel trilogy to his Lord of the Rings triumph, Peter Jackson has sadly saved the worst for last. The Battle of the Five Armies is 20 percent inspiration, 80 percent desperation.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Five armies are too many.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
While it's true that none of the "Hobbit" films were as good as any in the "Rings" trilogy, "The Five Armies" at least comes closest to capturing Tolkein's essence. And in this instance that is good enough.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
All this plot unfolds like obligation, a paragraph of book-report summary bulked up to feature length.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
OK, Mr. Jackson, you proved your point by landing the big finish. Now please, no more Middle-earth, ever.

Name : Kerry Lengel / Alias : Arizona Republic
Tolkien's richly imagined novels served as the template for an entire genre of "epic fantasy," and the opportunity to spend a final 144 minutes inside that world . is more than worth the price of a 3-D movie ticket.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
Jackson's storytelling at this point is so driven by green-screen trickery and digital legerdemain that he seems to have forgotten about human emotion.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
The result is at once the trilogy's most engrossing episode, its most expeditious (at a comparatively lean 144 minutes) and also itsdarkest - both visually and in terms of the forces thatstir in the hearts of men, dwarves and orcs alike.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
If The Hobbit doesn't equal the achievement of Jackson's earlier Middle-earth movies - and, honestly, what could? - it is still, in sum, a thrilling effort.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
If you want to see a Renaissance faire turned into an apocalyptic battlefield, this is the ticket.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
While more than enough praise has been poured on Jackson and his singular gift for CG spectacle, Martin Freeman deserves some credit for lending humor and humanity to what could have been a numbing orgy of pixelated mayhem.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
The best film of The Hobbit's three, this final installment is closer in quality to The Lord of the Rings than to its immediate predecessors.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
What is perhaps most depressing about Jackson's swollen Hobbit enterprise is the way it retrospectively diminishes his Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Name : Nicolas Rapold / Alias : New York Times
Bilbo may fully learn a sense of friendship and duty, and have quite a story to tell, but somewhere along the way, Mr. Jackson loses much of the magic.

Name : John Semley / Alias : Globe and Mail
It plays out as if someone chucked a whole bunch of carefully detailed Warhammer figurines into a centrifuge - goblins, goats, dwarfs, wizards and wolves bouncing off one another in waves of alternating tedium and punishment.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
Untold manpower, pixels, and money culminate in the gangbusters final installment. It can't redeem the useless tedium of the first two, which exist for gargantuan profits and structural necessity.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
It's sad that Hollywood filmmaking is so often about attempting to put the dreams of children onto our screens, but shouldn't it still be notable when someone actually manages it?

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
It was too much, and it was not enough.

Name : Jonathan L. Fischer / Alias : Slate
It may occasionally seem to be aware of its undiluted preposterousness, but that hardly eases the experience of sitting through its endless cartoonish action sequences and overwrought emotional payoffs.

Name : John Wenzel / Alias : Denver Post
It's a big, bold, schizophrenic pageant that still manages to work on a surprising number of levels - creative liberties and indulgences be damned.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
Considered as contemporary CGI-driven action-adventure cinema, and as the template for a new generation of video games, they are rich and entertaining. Even in the decadent phase of his genius, Jackson remains an expert world-builder and image-maker.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
There's far too many moments of sabre-rattling, and too much confusion about who is aligned with whom, and why. Those who know and love Tolkien's texts will have a vested interest. Everyone else may grow restless.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
Well, at least there won't be another one for a while.

Name : Bruce Ingram / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Fighting - presented with Jackson's usual double helpings of visual splendor, emotional oomph and low-key comedy - is what "Battle of the Five Armies" is all about.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
This third installment of The Hobbit trilogy is allegedly the shortest of all of Peter Jackson's Tolkien films, but my theater must have been orbiting a black hole because I could swear it swallowed up 20 years of my life.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It's designed to leave the audience drained and exhilarated, and from its opening scenes of exploding awesomeness there's no looking back.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
What looked like indulgent folly at the outset now seems closer to epic justification, as Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy draws to a rousing close.