The Birds

#13 in my Ranking of Alfred Hitchcock's films. This movie has no business working as well as it does. It’s a horror movie about birds that largely stops giving its characters room to grow at the halfway point to focus on pure survival. And yet, it’s got such a good build of tension over the…

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Psycho

#4 in my Ranking of Alfred Hitchcock's films. This was one of Hitchcock’s experiment films. After the lavish productions of Vertigo and North by Northwest, and while noting the financial success of smaller and cheaper B-movies, he decided that he wanted to make a movie for less than a million dollars. He hired a lot…

North by Northwest

#6 in my Ranking of Alfred Hitchcock's films. Ernest Lehman, the writer of North by Northwest, set out to write the “ultimate Alfred Hitchcock film,” and I think he succeeded. This is probably the most Hitchcockian movie Alfred Hitchcock ever lensed, the summation of a career of obsessions and ideas into one film. It’s his…

Vertigo

#2 in my Ranking of Alfred Hitchcock's films. From the opening credits, it’s easy to tell that there’s something darker and weirder about this journey into obsession and control from Hitchcock. The music from Bernard Hermann is haunting. The neon spirals spinning against a black background are a visual representation of the trippy journey to…

The Wrong Man

#9 in my Ranking of Alfred Hitchcock's films. Hitchcock does cinema verité (sort of), and he handles it really well. It’s a true tale of Manny Balestrero who was mistaken for another man who had been holding up different businesses in Jackson Heights, Queens. It’s one of several movies in a row where contemporary critics…