The new Terry Gilliam film, “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus,” has one of those roll-up, roll-up titles that appeal to Gilliam, who is not so much a movie director as a carnival barker with a bent for motion pictures. The last example was “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” and some of its tropes return here: the team of travelling players, and the elderly fabulist who tries to dictate the proceedings. In this case, our aging hero, Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), is perched inside a mobile theatre, of antiquated design, which is trundled through modern London; part of the movie’s charm is its brazen anachronism—a sense that the past can seep through time and burst into the here and now. (And the now is pretty wretched: rusting wastelands beside the Thames.)

Also in attendance are Tom Waits, as a smiling Beelzebub in a bowler hat; a dwarf, sadly compulsory in any work that flirts with the surreal; and, as Parnassus’s daughter, the British model Lily Cole, whose unearthly heart of a face is like a special effect. Above all, we get four types of Tony, the gadabout who consorts with Parnassus’s troupe. He is played by Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, Jude Law, and Heath Ledger, the first three deputizing for the last, who died before the film’s completion. It should not be mistaken for his finest hour; we see his larking, but not the undertow of frailty that tugged at “Brokeback Mountain,” and his principal duty here, like everyone else’s, is to go with the flow of phantasmagoria.

Thus, people are invited onto the Doctor’s stage and sent through a rickety mirror, into a world where anything goes—a candy-colored landscape out of “Mary Poppins,” an oily river that curls up into a snake’s head, you name it. Are these embodiments of each person’s fancy, or did Parnassus himself cook them up? I have no idea, any more than I can decide whether C.G.I. was the best or the worst thing that could have happened to Terry Gilliam. His gifts of invention were already so fecund, and so prolix, that this newfound ability to construct anything that drifts into his mind’s eye—as opposed to the ramshackle, hand-drawn delight of his earlier animation—spells both enchantment and chaos. He can follow any train of thought, so he does, and it’s no surprise when the trains run out of steam.

No such mania infects “The Young Victoria,” Jean-Marc Vallée’s account of the monarch’s early years, which veers in the other direction. From the start, it feels handsome, steady, and stuck; the ties that bind the historical bio-pic are no looser than those which constrain a royal personage, and the frustration to which Victoria would later admit (“I had led a very unhappy life as a child—had no scope for my very violent feelings of affection”) is legible in the face of Emily Blunt, who takes the title role. She is attended by a host of British actors—Paul Bettany, though too young, makes a winning and cynical Lord Melbourne, and Jim Broadbent, resembling a Gillray cartoon, detonates the stolid tale with a loud, and well-attested, explosion of rage at a banquet—but the movie, like the age that it depicts, stands or falls on the woman at its core. Blunt strikes me as the real deal: languid but biting, like Jeanne Moreau, yet able to command a scene while somehow appearing to shift to one side (as Moreau would never do) and observe with a skeptic’s smile. The little puff of relief that Victoria gives after addressing the Privy Council on the morning of her accession is, despite her duties, the exhalation of a free spirit, and one prays that films more liberating than this, and more likely to feed Blunt’s appetites, will come her way. The Colin Firth of “A Single Man,” likewise, rises above the atmosphere that encircles him. He plays George, who teaches literature at a college in Los Angeles, in 1962, while mourning the loss of his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), in a car accident. When George walks through the snow toward the crash site, not only are his pants perfectly creased but even the corpse preserves a certain je ne sais quoi. True, this is a dream sequence, but then the whole movie, with its glazed and polished air, could be a dream. We know, for instance, how English professors dress: some trim-suited and clerical, others avuncular in tweed, many too deep in Dryden to be bothered with their outward crust, and one or two no better than compost heaps. Not this lot. They look as spry and as spotless as an advertising spread in L’Uomo Vogue. Who’s in charge here, for heaven’s sake—a fashion designer?

Well, yes, for “A Single Man” is the first feature to be directed by Tom Ford. The hero of the story, adapted from the novel by Christopher Isherwood, explains himself in voice-overs: “Just get through the goddamned day: bit melodramatic, perhaps, but then again, my heart has been broken. Feel as if I’m drowning, sinking, can’t breathe,” he says. Such wordiness seems unjust to Firth, who is perfectly capable of showing any congestion of spirit by body language alone. The film is slowed by its own beauty, but it is salvaged by two majestic scenes. In one, George learns of Jim’s death in a phone call from a relative, during which his voice (this being 1962) must betray nothing, leaving his face (on which Ford is smart enough to keep the camera) to do all the work; in another, George goes around for a long evening with his friend Charley (Julianne Moore), who likes to start boozing as she puts on her face in the morning. Two characters trying and failing to drown their hopes and regrets, and two strong actors refusing to be tight-laced by a director’s exercise in style: here is a mood piece looking for a fight. ♦