V for Vendetta Review

Weaving had to build a character with no eyes, no mouth and no face, using only voice, posture and the tilt of a mask, and the alliterative introduction speech should be ridiculous and instead establishes a man who has made theatre out of rage. Natalie Portman's Evey is the audience's route in, and the imprisonment sequence, shot in cold institutional grey, is the film's real centre; the Valerie letter, passed between cells on sheets of toilet paper and read in voiceover, is genuinely devastating and belongs to no genre at all.

Adrian Biddle photographs a London of curfews and yellow sodium light, and John Hurt's screen dictator is a smart inversion of his own past casting. The compromises are worth naming. Moore's anarchism is sanded into a broadly liberal objection to surveillance and religious authoritarianism, which makes the film more usable and less dangerous, and Moore removed his name accordingly. The final act depends on a knife fight against armoured men that the film shoots as slow motion spectacle rather than the grubby thing it should be.