“Tarkovsky meets the Wachowski brothers” is how producer Konstantin Ernst describes Night Watch, the fantasy epic that is the highest-grossing Russian film of all time (by a factor of eight, no less).

There may never have been a stranger movie star than Johnny Depp. For a decade and a half, he’s been cast as a rather wide variety of key eccentrics, oddball naifs and sympathetic grotesques. He rose to stardom in Tim Burton’s DayGlo fantasy, Edward Scissorhands, and went on through a number of offbeat, idiosyncratic movies, while remaining a star. It’s not clear how he’s got away with it, although being uncommonly handsome can’t hurt. He’s never made it to the first rank of stellar leading men, but this probably doesn’t concern him much, considering his choices. (He turned down Speed.) His manifestly obvious gifts and adeptness also seem to have earned him some latitude.

A chance encounter causes a man to remember his past, when as a child in a rural village he was obsessed with movies and the run-down theater that showed them to people eager for an evening’s respite from their hard lives.