V for Vendetta

Skippable as a DC film and the most culturally consequential thing on this page. The mask became the standard face of anonymous protest worldwide within five years of release, which is a strange fate for a studio adaptation of a 1980s British comic.

The Wachowskis wrote it and James McTeigue directed, and the adaptation makes one significant change: Alan Moore's original is explicitly about anarchism against fascism, written under a particular British government, and the film reframes it toward a broader argument about state surveillance, religious authoritarianism and media control. Moore disowned it and removed his name, as he has from every adaptation of his work.

What survives is the thing that matters, which is that the protagonist is a terrorist and the film does not resolve that. He blows up buildings, tortures the woman he cares about in order to free her of fear, and is never presented as correct, only as a consequence. The sequence in which Evey reads a letter written on toilet paper by a dead woman is the best in the film.

Hugo Weaving plays the whole part behind a fixed mask, having replaced another actor several weeks into shooting, and does it with posture and voice alone. John Hurt, who had starred in a film of Nineteen Eighty-Four, is cast as the dictator on a screen.