Vertigo

Dress up becomes a matter of fevered fixation in Hitchcock’s utterly intoxicating thriller, in which ex-cop-cum-snoop-for-hire Scottie Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) sets out on a routine job tailing the mysterious Madeline (Kim Novak), an old pal’s wife—and soon finds himself in the center of a whirlpool of romantic obsession and supernatural quandaries, speeding towards a tragic denouement. Perennially on the short list of the greatest films of all time, Hitchcock’s film of death, desire, and doppelgangers—a key inspiration haunting every frame of Chantal Akerman's La Captive—has lost none of its ability to simultaneously seduce and repel. “One of the landmarks—not merely of the movies, but of 20th-century art.”—Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader