If there's one film which could stage an upset at this year's Oscars and pip The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King to Best Picture, it's Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Charles Frazier's novel.

Cold Mountain is a sweeping, emotionally fraught epic about love, devotion and endurance against the odds, set amid the bloody and brutal turmoil of the American Civil War.

Having been seriously wounded in battle, Confederate soldier Inman (Jude Law) leaves his hospital bed and begins the slow and arduous journey home to his sweetheart Ada (Nicole Kidman) in the remote North Carolina hills.

Deemed a deserter by his own side, Inman is forced to keep to the back roads to avoid capture, where he encounters a motley crew of outlaws and Good Samaritans who help and hinder his progress.

Meanwhile, back home, Ada waits patiently for her beloved Inman and struggles to keep the home fires burning.

Following the death of her preacher father (Donald Sutherland), she is bereft of companionship and bravely fends off the sexual advances of the town's self-appointed sheriff Teague (Ray Winstone).

Help arrives in the unlikely form of a feisty drifter called Ruby (Rene Zellweger), who teaches Ada about strength and self-reliance, and gives her the courage to endure.

Cold Mountain is another stunningly assured piece of filmmaking from Minghella and his talented team, who collected Oscars by the handful for their work on The English Patient.

Like that film, this is a sweeping love story which tugs the heart-strings as the characters battle valiantly to be reunited, despite the terrible emotional costs to themselves.

Law is superb, his faced etched with the agony of a man scarred by war, and Kidman is mesmerising as the well-bred, sheltered woman forced to fend for herself in a cruel, unforgiving world.

However, the film undeniably belongs to Zellweger, with a tour-de-force supporting turn that is at once hysterically funny and heartbreaking.

The 152-minute running time demands patience, but as you become engrossed in Inman's journey home, which runs parallel to Ada and Ruby's fight to survive, you fall under the film's spell.

The enchantment lingers well after the end credits roll.

GEORGE GAYNOR