The Great Films Series: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

In 1952, Sight and Sound film magazine had the novel idea of asking critics to name the greatest films of all time. The tradition became decennial, increasing in size and prestige as the decades passed.  The Sight and Sound poll has come to be regarded as the most important of the "greatest ever film" lists. The critic Roger Ebert described it as "the most respected of the countless polls of great movies." Join us this Spring and Summer as we explore and view these films. 

Voted the greatest film in 2012, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo is a psychological thriller that follows a San Francisco private detective who comes out of retirement to trail an old schoolmate’s beautiful wife, who appears to be haunted by a figure from her ancestral past. Both an ingeniously plotted mystery and a profoundly disturbing tale of romantic obsession, Vertigo is an emotional experience like no other—an astonishment on the level of image, sound, and storytelling. James Stewart’s rightfully acclaimed performance as a man who falls into spirals of psychosis is matched at every turn by Kim Novak’s ethereal work as two different, yet equally tragic women: the inscrutable Madeleine and the earthy Judy.