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40A disappointing excursion into movie history.
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60Hitchcock for dummies: brisk, jolly, well-played but oversimplified.
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60Hitchcock purists will certainly take issue with some details, but Gervasi's film shouldn't be taken as an ironclad factual film docudrama. Rather, it is fact-inspired fiction -- a film based on real events but one that isn't shy about taking creative liberties. As long as viewers keep that in mind, Gervasi's stands to be a nice bit of murderous fun.
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67There's fun to be had in the re-creation of indelible screen moments, including several with Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh and James D'Arcy as Anthony Perkins.
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25Hitchcock spends too much time off the set of Psycho, where the real story was, and focuses instead on incidental matters that feel like outtakes. Mother would not have been pleased.
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75Mirren simply is, and she takes Hitchcock up a notch with every look and line.
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50This film is more a love story about the marriage between Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) and his wife, Alma Reville (Helen Mirren), rather than a historically accurate backstage look at the making of this important movie in the Hitchcock filmography and the American psyche.
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75A movie as fun as it is flawed.
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63Hitchcock is an amusing lark, but the clumsy way it dissects the director is for the birds.
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75Jessica Biel is Vera Miles, the star who had the nerve to get pregnant when Hitchcock wanted her for "Vertigo." He feels betrayed, and she feels relieved, consigned to a supporting role in Psycho as Marion's sister. And Toni Collette, in glasses and a dark wig, is Hitchcock's long-suffering secretary, Peggy. Both Biel and Collette are very good, engaging.
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63I prefer [HBO's Hitchcock biopic] "The Girl," not because of its salaciousness but because it gets at something underneath the great (truly, great) director's skin.
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50For all his creepy tendencies, Hitchcock is portrayed mostly sympathetically in Hitchcock, in which Sir Anthony Hopkins plays the corpulent British auteur with a combination of hauteur and playfulness.
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63Though the film is titled Hitchcock and ostensibly centers on the legendary director, we get a better sense of the women around him than the enigmatic filmmaker.
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63Hitchcock unspools at that deliciously silly juncture where biography meets fallacy. Translation: Any director who could crank out Psycho must be a crackpot himself.
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75Hitchcock isn't ambitious or complicated. It's simple, does what it sets out to do, and gets out before anyone even thinks about checking the time. More movies should be made in its image.
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50Hopkins has been fitted out prosthetically to resemble Hitchcock and he does a reasonably good job of impersonating him, but it's a foredoomed effort.
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38This is all a long way of saying that the best way to better understand the man who made those and dozens of other movies is simply to see them. There's no case to be made for a mangy shortcut like Hitchcock. It's all surface and formula.
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70Hitchcock is, well, fun. More fun than good, really. It feels weird to call it a disappointment, because it is entertaining. But you can't help feeling a little shortchanged on the deep-thinking front.
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10Hitchcock rings false from start to finish.
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60Despite its definitive title, you won't actually learn much about Alfred Hitchcock from Sacha Gervasi's briskly superficial biopic. But you'll enjoy the experience anyway.
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50Making his feature debut, director Sacha Gervasi follows up his fine documentary "Anvil: The Story Of Anvil" with another story about the perils of uncompromising creative endeavor, but his Hitchcock goes only a step beyond caricature.
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60Hitchcock puts major league star power at the service of its peek-behind-closed-doors premise. But whatever that relationship was like in real life, this is one cinematic portrait of a marriage we could have lived without.
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60The movie has its diversions, including Scarlett Johansson's bodacious Janet Leigh and Michael Stuhlbarg's wheedling Lew Wasserman. It's fluff. But while its dim fantasies about Hitchcock and the association of genius with psychosis can be written off as silly, they also smack of spiteful jealousy.
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60The film never coheres. Trying to carve out a space between black comedy and straight evocation of a difficult but rewarding marriage, the movie never settles on a tone.
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50I wouldn't recommend Hitchcock to cinephiles seeking a bold new take on the master's life or work, but if all you want is to while away the afternoon in the company of some excellent actors in plummy period costume, Gervasi's film is not without its pleasures.
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Nov 21, 201250That feeling of utter disposability pervades throughout the film, underlining the missteps of Gervasi by aiming for breezy entertainment while forgetting to pause and inject some genuine emotion in there as well.
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75When Hopkins' Hitch directs the audience by waving his hands like a symphony conductor - it's a nice callback to a Hannibal Lecter highlight - it's one of the best scenes of the year: a delightfully personal way to show how the story of "Psycho" concluded.
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75Hitchcock tells the story not so much as the making of the film, but as the behind-the-scenes relationship of Alma and Hitch. This is a disappointment, since I imagine most movie fans will expect more info about the film's production history.
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83It's a perfect summation of why he was the ultimate filmmaker.
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70It's a feel-good frolic, which is fine for anyone who prefers their Hitchcock history tidied up, absent the megalomania, the condescending cruelty and tendency to sexual harassment that caused his post-Psycho blonde discovery Tippi Hedren to declare him "a mean, mean man."
User score distribution:
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Positive: 17 out of 23
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Mixed: 6 out of 23
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Negative: 0 out of 23
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Broadly enjoyable pop art bio pic.