V for Vendetta

Adapted by the Wachowskis from Alan Moore and David Lloyd's 1982 graphic novel and directed by James McTeigue, their first assistant director on The Matrix, V for Vendetta was shot at Babelsberg in Berlin and on London streets closed for the purpose, as a British-German-American production. Moore removed his name from it; Lloyd defended it. That argument — over whether an anarchist parable had been reworked into something more comfortable — has followed the film ever since.

Hugo Weaving plays V entirely behind a fixed Guy Fawkes mask, which forces the performance into the voice and the posture, and gets more out of both than seemed possible. Natalie Portman is Evey, working at the state broadcaster; Stephen Rea is the detective assembling the case; John Hurt, who was Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, plays the Chancellor on a wall of screens. Adrian Biddle shot it, his last film before his death.

The reviews were mixed on release — 73% on Rotten Tomatoes — and the film has since outrun them completely: 8.1 on IMDb from 1.3 million votes and a 3.9 Letterboxd average across a million ratings, numbers matched by almost nothing else in this catalogue. It is also the rare adaptation whose imagery escaped it entirely: the mask went from prop to protest uniform within five years, worn at demonstrations on every continent by people who had never read the comic.