The Ring

Fellowship is the real deal, a movie epic that pops your eyes out, piles on thrills and fun, and yet stays intimately attuned to character.

Fashioned by a buff, The Lord of the Rings is a banquet for the buff in us all. I left exhausted, happy, intoxicated.

The Movie Works. It has real passion, real emotion, real terror, and a tactile sense of evil that is missing in that other current movie dealing with wizards, wonders and wickedness.

You believe in everything.

Vibrantly, intricately alive on its own terms. This is what magic the movies can conjure with an inspired fellowship in charge, and unlimited pots of gold.

With its spectacular scenery, stupefying effects and epic scope, is a dream come true.

I see it as nearly perfect: It's one of the best fantasy pictures ever made.

Though faithful in every detail to Tolkien, it has a vigorous life of its own -- grandeur, moral heft and emotional depth.

So good it's scary.

Not since the original ''Star Wars'' trilogy has film dipped into myth and emerged with the kind of weight and heft seen in Peter Jackson's first installment of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.