The movie Darkest Hour, starring Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill, captivated me. For a couple of hours, I was aware of little except what was acted on the screen. I was there in Britain’s darkest hour when Hitler, having rolled over most of Europe, was miraculously stayed.

Our present time calls us to revisit past times when the forces of good, heavily besieged, nevertheless triumphed over evil. We gather around our virtual campfires, telling our stories and renewing our strength.

Dunkirk is another movie visiting this same time period. At the end of the movie, two soldiers have just escaped to England. They have been rescued by the armada of small private vessels that brought thousands of the British army from France to safety. One of the soldiers reads an account of the speech Churchill delivers at the end of Darkest Hour.

By contrast, another movie, The Post, dramatizes later history in the United States, that of the Watergate scandal. We sense that this movie was made with our current era in mind.

Men in high places were guilty of abusing their power. The fact that Katharine Graham stars as a woman newspaper publisher in a vocation dominated by men adds to its timeliness.

I have not yet seen The Post and cannot offer a critique. I am certain, though, that as long as we are able to recite tales of past victory over dark forces, we retain the possibility of overcoming our own darkest hour.