The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Essential, and start here regardless of what the chronological order on this page says. The Hobbit films were made for people who already know what Gandalf is worried about, what a Ring does to the person carrying it, and why a brief glimpse of an abandoned fortress is supposed to mean something. Watched first they are a children's adventure with inexplicable portents in it.

The thing this film does better than either of its sequels is patience. Forty minutes pass in the Shire before anybody leaves it, and that time is doing structural work: everything the trilogy later asks you to care about is a thing you watched being ordinary. The Council of Elrond is twenty minutes of people arguing in chairs, and it is gripping, because by then the argument is about something.

The practical scale is the reason it has not aged. All three films were shot at once across more than a year in New Zealand, with real landscapes, built sets, forced-perspective camera rigs rather than digital shrinking, and tens of thousands of hand-made props. Moria is a set. The Balrog is the one major digital creature and it arrives in darkness and firelight.

On which version: the Extended Edition adds around half an hour and this is the one film of the six where the theatrical cut is arguably the tighter object. The additions are good (Lothlórien, the gifts, more of the Shire) and they are additions rather than repairs. Watch either. Howard Shore's score is the best written for a film in forty years and the Extended has more of it.