It may lack the blood and thunder of later instalments, but for us the first ‘Rings’ film remains the best: it has the most direct narrative – a road movie, essentially, from the rustic middle-English hush of the Shire to the forbidding shores of the Anduin – and the sweetest character moments, from Bilbo’s sad departure to Boromir’s sacrificial end. With his grand, globe-conquering adaptation of JRR Tolkein’s genre-defining trilogy, Peter Jackson dragged fantasy into the digital age, managing beyond all the odds to make it at least semi-cool in the process.

🛸 The 100 best sci-fi movies of all time But you’ll also find movies of a more surreal bent, and some that reimagine our own planet as a place where magic, mystery and adventure is hiding in plain sight. But for the purposes of this list, we’re not limiting the definition of ‘fantasy’ to swords-and-dwarves epics and superhero flicks. Once considered the realm of those freaks and geeks playing Dungeons & Dragons in their parents’ basements and duelling with cardboard swords in the park, fantasy movies are now big business, thanks to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Game of Thrones and, of course, the omnipresent Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Want to walk with elves and orcs? Learn some spells? Slay dragons? Or just get stuck in a time loop, repeating the same day over and over until you discover the true meaning of love? A great fantasy film won’t just show you a different universe – it will take you there and plop you down right in the thick of the action. The real world getting you down? Want to get away? Film is a powerful tool for escaping mundane reality, and no genre can transport you to a different place better than fantasy.

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