THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

This is a movie that prefers to speak in declarations instead of dialogue. Lines are spoken like they’re pounding on the table and throwing open the curtains. They feel like they’ve been waiting years to reach an audience. And maybe they have. After all, this is a movie about revolution, and revolutions usually take centuries to simmer before they ignite.

Britain is depicted here in full dictatorship mode. Its citizens are subjected to strict curfews, jackboot patrols, and a High Chancellor (John Hurt) who projects himself as a giant face across state-run broadcasts to bellow things about purity, order, and obedience. Every room is surveilled, torture is practically written in the law books—if they’re not outright written. In other words, this is a government that’s not subtle about its oppression. Freedoms must have been voted away long ago, bit by bit, until none remained.

This film is an adaptation of the Alan Moore comic, which had borrowed freely from George Orwell’s 1984. Then it added on top of that a decadent kind of theatricality and Victorian flourish—all spliced with the legend of Guy Fawkes. This film is a fable of masks, fire, and ritual cleansing.

Hugo Weaving plays V, a caped phantom who adopts the Guy Fawkes mask—a fixed, porcelain face with pointed chin, curled mustache, and frozen smile. He behaves like a method stage actor. He remains fixed in a hyper-realistic character, romanticizing Fawkes and insisting with unsettling cheer that Parliament deserves nothing more than to be blown up.

Opposite him is Natalie Portman as Evey Hammond, a young woman who works at the state-run television network. She tries her best to keep her head down, but lapses when she is caught outside after curfew meeting with a coworker. She is about to be assaulted by secret police when V intervenes, dispatching them with knives and then sweeping her into his underground gallery. She’s not sure exactly what she’s stumbled into, and maybe V isn’t either, but she’s deep into it now. And there’s only going to be two outcomes: Either she breaks, or Parliament burns.

Visually, this film is composed and deliberate. Every frame is rich and feels designed to echo. The cast is great, particularly Portman, who tracks Evey’s hardening—going from timidity to resolve—and is extraordinarily convincing. Weaving makes even overwritten speeches ring. Stephen Fry, as a closeted talk-show host with an illegal taste for culture, brings warmth and spirit until his satire of the Chancellor seals his fate. And Hurt bellows tyranny so fiercely that it borders on horror.

If the movie has one flaw it’s that it hits the allegory too hard. If you’ll roll your eyes or be drawn into all of this, that’s up to you. The speeches often feel labored, the metaphors bright as floodlights, the ideas are repeated until they echo. But the commitment is total. V for Vendetta has conviction. It’s a movie that’s aiming for myth, not nuance—and more often than not, it hits its target.

Even in the middle of the Depression, Hollywood’s romantic comedies still marched toward the same preordained destinations they do today. Vagabond Lady is hardly interested in breaking the mold, but at least it strolls along with enough personality to keep its footpath from feeling too worn.

Josephine (Evelyn Venable) is the unofficially adopted daughter of a well-to-do department store owner. She was raised alongside two sons. One is John (Reginald Denny), who grew into a stiff-lipped executive with cultural ambitions. The other is Tony (Robert Young), who turned out rather the opposite: a globe-trotter who treats formality like a seasonal allergy. Despite their near-sibling upbringing, Josephine is engaged to John. (Different times—a plot point that evidently didn’t read as awkward in the 1930s as it does today.) John is worried that she lacks the refinement to be his spouse, and so he decides to hand her to Tony for the job of polishing her up.

Bad idea, of course, if he wanted to keep her as a fiancée. Tony might have the family name, but he shares Josephine’s appreciation of common things. They’re supposed to spend their time gliding into society together, but instead they mock it. Then they duck out for a circus. This is really where the pleasure of this movie is—how easily this pair clicks, like two people discovering for the first time that there’s someone else out there who shares their interests. They always preferred to skip the symphony and go to a circus. It just wasn’t until now they could say that out loud.

The movie clocks in at barely more than an hour, but it moves with a brisk and pleasant pace thanks to the easygoing nature of the cast. They manage to keep things buoyant even when the script sinks into stock melodrama. While the direction of the movie is dictated by formula, the film follows it with a bit of swing. Call this a modest picture with a grin that refuses to straighten out.

Some films tell stories. This one casts a strange spell and leaves you to sort through the ashes. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders was released at the height of the Czechoslovak New Wave, and it unfolds entirely in allegory. Yet its central thread is strikingly direct as it traces the journey of a 13-year-old girl (the film’s namesake Valerie, played with wide-eyed calm by Jaroslava Schallerová) as she steps into womanhood. And what greets her on this journey is a nasty parade of predators, rituals, and ominous symbols.

Early on, Valerie has her first menstruation. After that, everything blurs. You see a splash of red wash over daisies. There’s a pair of magical earrings that disappear and then reappear whenever danger lurks nearby. There are vampires. There are leering priests. At one point, Valerie is even tied to a stake for witchcraft. But the next scene, she’s wandering free without a scratch. Continuity is beside the point.

This is a film that resists logic by design. This is not a film you follow as much as drift through. It’s like a dream that masquerades as a folktale. Or maybe that’s the other way around. It’s anybody’s guess. The imagery floats between surreal and unsettling, shot with a soft pastoral light and scored with music that sounds like it was recorded inside a haunted chapel in springtime.

Jaroslava Schallerová, as Valerie, moves through the film more as witness than participant. She’s chased, dressed, burned, or kissed—her face doesn’t shift. Detached, composed, faintly curious. She seems to know that she’s in a story. She just hasn’t been told what kind.

The film doesn’t connect in literal ways, and that’s a deliberate thing. Scenes drift, symbols withhold meaning. Innocence, sexuality, power shifts that come with reaching adulthood—all of which is bent through the prism of dream logic. A beautiful puzzle, a reverie laced with menace. You don’t watch Valerie and Her Week of Wonders for the plot. You watch it to get lost.