Vertigo: Critic Reviews

With less playfulness and much more overt libido than other Hitchcock classics, Vertigo was always anomalous.

You watch this guy going slowly over the brink and realize, good grief, this is Jimmy Stewart.

Do yourself an aesthetic favor: Take the plunge.

There is a glumness to the film that is notably missing from the director's other films of the period.

It is about how Hitchcock used, feared and tried to control women.

One of the landmarks--not merely of the movies, but of 20th-century art.

James Stewart, on camera almost constantly, comes through with a startlingly fine performance as the lawyer-cop who suffers from acrophobia.

One of the things that still amazes me about this movie is the way its study of obsession is so single-minded.

From a craft standpoint, Vertigo represents the director in peak form.

The old master, now a slave to television, has turned out another Hitchcock-and-bull story in which the mystery is not so much who done it as who cares.

A haunting meditation on sexual politics, romantic love, and obsession, Vertigo is one of the greatest surreal movies ever made.

Must-see Hitchcock thriller for any classic movie bug.

"Vertigo" is Alfred Hitchcock's beautifully stylized psychological thriller about a man in love with a fetishized romantic fantasy invented by another man.

Technically well made, but there are a plethora of more entertaining Hitchcock films available.

Vertigo is a kind of consummate illusion--tantalizing for being so often out of reach (DVDs don't match the reel deal), fulfilling only for bringing us as close as possible to Hitchcock's head and heart in Frisco circa '58. Or...

a disturbing and darkly revealing psychological thriller

After it, Psycho and the rest of the '60s are only a bitter precis of this thesis of sexual disassociation and identity politics.

Why is this movie Hitchcock's masterpiece? Because no movie plunges us more deeply into the dizzying heart of erotic obsession.

The "Vertigo" shot created for this film was so powerful and unique that everytime I see it used today, I get teary eyed.

Vertigo is an acknowledged masterpiece, one of those narrative films in which a bracing and unpredictable story has been distilled into a form that is at once classic and inventive.

Hitchcock was elsewhere an entertainer, often a great one, but Vertigo finds him working as an artist...

Alfred Hitchcock at his most disturbing.

A rich, resonant meditation of male romantic obsession ... Not only does Hitchcock demonstrate a total mastery of cinematic point-of-view, but he turns what might have been mere melodrama into film poetry. Perhaps his greatest film.

Slow but totally compelling.

Hitchcock's twisty, suspenseful tale is far more involving and memorable than most recent Hollywood thrillers.