Vertigo

Judged strictly as a movie (especially a subliminally disturbing movie), Vertigo hasn't lost a thing. You watch this guy going slowly over the brink and realize, good grief, this is Jimmy Stewart. [Restored version; Oct 1996, p.3D]

An audacious, brilliantly twisted movie, infused with touches of genius and of madness. A disturbing meditation on the interconnected nature of love and obsession disguised as a penny dreadful shocker. [13 Oct 1996, p.C5]

From the very first images of Saul Bass' credit sequence, the whorls and patterns revolving in darkness, the huge eye bathed in red, the movie lets us feel the heartbeat and divided soul of its hero. And its creator. It is a movie about desire, darkness and the pull toward destruction. Most of all, it is about impossible love and overwhelming fear--conveyed with consummate control and art. Watching it, we feel the fear, suffer the desire. [Restored version; 18 Oct 1996, p.1]

The most fascinatingly self-revelatory Hitchcock film of all...Vertigo is so dreamy, so druggy, that when it does actually introduce a dream scene, it seems excessive, jarring. And if Hitchcock was able to pick up on Stewart's capacity for relentlessness, he also exploited that side of Stewart's persona that told America it was watching a decent, homespun, plain-spoken guy. Stewart's character gets away with telling Novak who and what to be because he is able to convince us he is, at bottom, an innocent himself - and a victim. [25 Oct 1996, p.C10]

The real force of Vertigo, though, comes from Hitchcock's intimate depiction of perversity. Seldom has obsession stood so nakedly revealed. [Restored version; 15 Nov 1996, p.20]

Robert Burks' cinematography is outstanding, and composer Bernard Herrmann supplies one of his strongest, spookiest scores... A major influence on the movies and movie-making style of Brian De Palma (among many, many others), Vertigo has a dreamlike eeriness and a climax that is, well, downright dizzying. [29 Nov 1996, p.04]

Without question. Vertigo is one of the best movies ever made by one of the best directors. [Restored version; 7 Dec 1996, p.41]

Guilt and obsession combine to create the most personally revealing effort of his career. [Restored version; 13 Dec 1996, p.5]

Vertigo, which is one of the two or three best films Hitchcock ever made, is the most confessional, dealing directly with the themes that controlled his art. Read full review

All great art has within it some irreducible, inexplicable element, beyond its cleverness and craft. Such is the hold Vertigo has. This strange, frustrating story of a haunted pervert, Hitchcock's Byronic opus, still evades capture, and refuses to be something it's not. Read full review

Vertigo is one of the great movies about movies, and about Hitchcock’s own way with them. Read full review

Profound, penetrating and unfathomable rather than (quite) perfectly formed art. Vertigo pioneered that camera effect, known as the dolly zoom, whereby the viewer (the point of view is always Stewart’s) appears to fall into an infinite abyss while remaining quite still...The film itself is that abyss, and we’re still falling into it and for it. Read full review

Vertigo also combines in an almost unique balance Hitchcock’s brash flair for psychological shocks with his elegant genius for dapper stylishness. Like Psycho, it ends in an “o”, or maybe “oh!” The ancient house adjoining the Bates motel in Psycho certainly has an unearthly similarity to San Francisco’s creepy old McKitterick Hotel in Vertigo. [Rerelease] Read full review

This dizzyingly intricate film reveals new facets each time you see it. We leave Vertigo unsettled, like Scottie, who ends up on the edge of a precipice. Hitchcock is daring us to leap. He has prepared the ultimate fix for a cinema junkie: a movie to get lost in. Read full review

Alfred Hitchcock’s rich and strange masterwork. Read full review

Gripping throughout with frame upon frame of standout images and superb performances from the two leads. Read full review

An artistic triumph for the master of mystery. Read full review

The bleakness is perhaps a little hard to swallow, but there's no denying that this is the director at the very peak of his powers, while Novak is a revelation. Slow but totally compelling. Read full review

A thematic analysis can only scratch the surface of this extraordinarily dense and commanding film, perhaps the most intensely personal movie to emerge from the Hollywood cinema. Read full review

VERTIGO is also a masterpiece of filmmaking which includes one of the most important technical discoveries since the dawn of cinema--the dolly-out, zoom-in shot, which visually represents the dizzying sensation of vertigo. The result is a shot unique to Hitchcock, unlike any other before in film, one which will always bear his stamp. Read full review

The greatest sexual suspense drama ever made has come to be regarded by many Hitchcock admirers as his most accomplished film. It is certainly his most forlorn, and easily his most mesmerizing. [Restored] Read full review

After watching Vertigo at the Uptown, I was awestruck. Read full review

It’s a movie about memory that actually improves the more you go over its folds. Read full review

Why is this movie Hitchcock's masterpiece? Because no movie plunges us more deeply into the dizzying heart of erotic obsession...The older you get, and the m ore times you see it, the more strange, chillingly romantic thriller pierces your heart. Read full review

Brilliantly schematic, endlessly fascinating...this prescient 1958 spellbinder can now be admired as the deepest, darkest masterpiece of Hitchcock's career. [Restored version] Read full review

Vertigo stands as one of the thrill master's most psychologically dense and twisted works in which obsession, commitment, and dual identities all merge to create a voluptuous tale of thwarted love. [Restored version] Read full review

Easily the best thriller of this or any other recent year...It's the film that marks him as a genius, that proves the auteur (or authorial) theory of filmmaking all by itself. It's the movie that shows a distinctive stamp, the movie that could not possibly have been made by anyone else. And most important, Vertigo is immensely entertaining. It has great peformances from its stars, an overtly Wagnerian score from the celebrated Bernard Herrmann and a plot that is almost hopelessly complex. Almost. [23 Dec 1983, p.D1]

Believe us, that secret is so clever, even though it is devilishly far-fetched, that we wouldn't want to risk at all disturbing your inevitable enjoyment of the film. Read full review

Hitchcock does a masterful job blending all of Vertigo's diverse elements together. It's a love story, a mystery, and a thriller all rolled into one. It deals with issues of obsession, psychological and physical paralysis, and the tenuous nature of romantic love. Vertigo should really be seen more than once to be fully appreciated. Many of the darker, deeper aspects only begin to bubble to the surface on subsequent viewings. [Restored version] Read full review

Vertigo remains something less than a foolproof psychological spellbinder and agonizer. It's compulsively watchable and stylish, but the obsessive and delirious moods seem to exist apart from the creaky plot, which fails to convince one of the nature of the conspiracy that entraps Stewart's character in the first place or of the follow-up system of coincidence that eventually drives him up the fateful bell tower. [10 March 1984, p.G1]

Unfortunately, even that mastery is not enough to overcome one major fault, for the plain fact is that the film’s first half is too slow and too long. Read full review

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. Read full review